Okay, so it has been a long time since my last post, I’ve been quite busy for the past few months spending time with family and PSM! In a few days, the PlayStation Mobile program will be completing its first year in the wild. I had written about PSM almost a year ago so let’s see how the platform has changed in the past year. Is it finally picking up? What improvements have been made to the program and is it still worth developing for? Read on to find out 😉

Licence

One of the issues with PSM (in my view) was that there was a $100 licence fee, although it was for an entire year, I could never get comfortable with having to pay $100 just to get the hang of the platform. But then the PSM Developer Team made the SDK free for testing on PC, however a publisher licence was still required for on device testing. It was a step in the right direction, developers could now get a hang of the platform before actually spending any money. However, soon afterwards the entire licence was made free, allowing anyone to develop applications and sell them on the PlayStation Store. Originally, the free licence promotion was going to last until September; however as it stands today, PSM licences are still free!

This is definitely a great thing as it has attracted talented new developers, like Kold Games, who is working on a very promising game, Shadows

features

When it was first launched, PSM was a very limited platform, a lot of the functionality available on all the target platforms was unavailable, however by now, PSM has changed a lot. By SDK version 1.11, there were some new features, developers had access to the device camera and GPS. Then on August 21st came a huge update and a release of SDK v1.20. This update added some of the features a lot of developers had been asking for, namely PSN integration – PSM got PSN leaderboard support, and mono VM optimization which brought noticeable speed improvements on the PSVita mono runtime.

I think that Sony definitely took a step in the right direction with new features in PSM. What more could a developer want than to be able to fully utilize the abilities of a device?

Games

In the end, the number of games on the platform decide if it’s a success or a failure. There are now over a hundred games on the platform which is quite good for one year, despite its slow start, PSM has managed to attract quite a few developers. Also, some of the games are truly amazing, some of my favorites being:

 

Quick Trivia – The last one – Switch Galaxy became so popular that the developers are onboard the PS4 and PSVita bandwagon, here’s the PS4 version trailer:

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If you’ve read my previous article about PSM, you can probably tell that my opinions have changed completely. What about yours? Do you think PSM is slowly becoming more viable or do you think that it is still mostly a failure?

Post your opinion in the comments section below.