You probably already know the story so far about how Sony treats indie developers – the PS4 will support self-publishing, indies are able to control the release date and price, SCEE is holding indie events, and Sony employees like Adam Boyes and Shahid Ahmad are constantly reaching out to studios. Now it’s time for the latest chapter – Sony is offering free advice to indie developers.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe senior account manager Agostino Simonetta told Develop that free optional advice will be available to developers ahead of the final approval process. The advice can be sought multiple times, and developers don’t have to listen to whatever Sony says.

The important thing is as a developer you have the right to completely disregard our comments. So what we’re seeing is a lot of developers ask for our feedback, and some developers implement it as well. The fact it is not mandatory to change anything has actually created a better atmosphere. They appreciate the feedback, and they have the freedom to do what they like. And the same applies to the technical side. So the R&D group, they are there to support developers. If developers want to send their code in because they are struggling with a bug related to the platform, or optimization, or they want some advice, they can do that. We often send engineers in, because sometimes it’s best to have an engineer on-site to be able to see a few programmers face-to-face. You don’t need to be a big publisher to get that; any company can get that. We do it with companies of any size.

However, Simonetta has said that Sony is yet to finalize their plans for the quality assurance process, such as how stringent guidelines are, or how long the QA will take.

What are you thoughts on Sony giving help to indie developers? Do we even need to ask? Sound off below.