Updated June 2010
Publishing and developing PSP Minis is very similar in scope to developing for iPhone. There is no concept approval process and you are free to do pretty much anything you want.
Well – technically there is a one stage concept approval required by SOA – but they are pretty reasonable and certainly don’t appear to insist on any extra features.
Sony are more approachable now than they have ever been for smaller studios, especially on the Minis platform. I have even heard rumours that they may loan dev kits to developers too!
Game sizes are up to 100MB; which is plenty of space for just about anything you could throw at it.
Financial Costs
Development kits and test stations are fairly cheap, around €1200 and €250 respectively.
You will need to handle your own QA, along with official age ratings – requirements are PEGI for SCEE territories (€250) and ESRB for North America ($800).
There is no requirement to provide an electronic manual, but the Meta data (marketing info) for each title needs to be translated into all of the languages for the regions you intend to release in. This can include:
- French
- Italian
- German
- Spanish
- Dutch
- Portuguese
- Russian
Marketing
You get 60 Voucher Codes for PAL territories, and up to 200 codes for NTSC; these can be used for non-promotional uses (ie: media, review, internal). You receive them within 3 to 5 days of your game release (you have to request the NTSC codes).
Sales Projections
From all accounts you are looking at much less than on similar services like WiiWare and DSiWare. From what we have heard the bestselling titles are max 20-30k range and many titles sell just a few hundred copies.
Currently you are free to set the wholesale price for a Mini, and Sony then apply a margin of 30%. Sales reports are provided on a monthly basis.
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