"I think that consumers as creators, or the creative community, is a reality of a creative medium moving forward," says Chris Satchell, general manager of Microsoft's game developer group. "There are so many amazing ideas in the community that go undeveloped because there is a lack of the right tools and distribution channels."
It would appear that this is a matter of considerable change. Quite suddenly, it seems, each of the big three console manufacturers is promoting a growing acknowledgement of the homebrew community, putting together apparently egalitarian schemes to help democratise console development. Yet, while all have described their intentions in similar terms, their various efforts to empower the hobbyist developer have taken very distinct routes.
The acceleration of the homebrew development community correlates directly to the ever-increasing spread of the internet. Interconnectivity has enabled rapid communication between like-minded types, fostered communities, accelerated the sharing of technology, and opened up new distribution methods. As you would expect, among all the possible gaming platforms, the PC has had a big head start in this respect and, with its few restrictions on access, the internet's Flash gaming community has become a hotbed of ingenuity.
Console gaming has always been tougher for the indie scene to crack, not least because it has been substantially slower to find its way online. Additionally, unlike the PC, developing for consoles has previously required a much greater degree of direct co-operation from manufacturers: except for a clutch of industrious hackers, only the manufacturers can grant access to their machines through proprietary programming interfaces.
Yet, suddenly, we are seeing a universally professed enthusiasm for nurturing indie development—Microsoft has XNA, a paid-for development and distribution service, Nintendo has WiiWare, a means of publishing indie content and making it available to the Wii's entire audience, and Sony brought Linux to PS3 with the intention of encouraging individuals to create applications for it.
"Because we have plans for having Linux on board [the PS3], we also recognise Linux programming activities," said the head of the software platform division of SCEI, Izumi Kawanishi, in an interview last year. "Other than game studios tied to official developer licences, we'd like to see various individuals participate in content creation for the PS3."
The power of homebrew development will of course be familiar to Sony—besides the fact that it remains one of the major forces sustaining its PSP, the company was one of the first to bring home console development to the notice of the wider gaming audience with the release of a PlayStation development kit in 1997.
"Clearly part of our desire to open up our hardware was to respond to the enormous interest from consumers, students and academic institutions who wanted to access the power of PlayStation," says Sony's president of technology, Paul Holman. "The decision was driven by those in the company who had grown up with access to the Amigas, Spectrums, Atari 800s and BBC Micros."
Called Net Yaroze, meaning 'Let's Create', the kit was available through mail order at the price of $750. For that sum, an aspiring developer could get his hands on a debugging PlayStation, connect it up to a PC and start programming using a package of proprietary tools—cut-down versions of the more expensive tools that professional developers were using. Net Yaroze's lifetime saw increasing levels of support for third party tools, like Codewarrior and Lightwave 3D, as well as dedicated Usenet groups.
"We had to manufacture a special variant of the console and provide cables and software for the PC," says Holman. "It was costly and complicated—but we saw amazing results in terms of the games and ideas from the community that grew up around the project. PlayStation 2 Linux built upon the lessons of Net Yaroze—the PC was no longer necessary, and a standard consumer unit could be upgraded, much reducing the cost—although we carried out the work of porting Linux in-house.