Dear Esther developers, The Chinese Room has stated that currently Sony’s Playstation 4 is the easy choice for indies games and indie developers.

In a recent interview to GamesTM, Dear Esther Creative Director Dan Pinchbeck stated that the reason Xbox One is receiving step-child like treatment from indie developers are Microsoft’s behaviour and the way they treated indies dev in the past plus the negative publicity Xbox One received after its official announcement in May 2013.

“I find it still surprising how badly things can be handled,” said creative director Dan Pinchbeck. “I’ve never known such a difference in a console launch in terms of how polarised the PR success has been. It’s extraordinary.

“Like a lot of small studios, it set the agenda of where we were going to go if we were going to make choices.”

“At this point, if we were choosing between consoles, it would be extremely hard for us not to go to PS4 and that’s something that Microsoft have to listen to,” Pinchbeck continued.

“The way they treated indies on XBLA wasn’t good and the reputation got around and indies stopped working for them. It’s one of the reasons why the XBLA isn’t as powerful as the PSN Store because it hasn’t got the products.

“They mistreated the people making the products and if you do that people will stop making games for you,” Pinchbeck said. “And that’s good, that’s the democratisation of how the game making system works and Sony has been smart and listened to that.”

The studio feel that the voice of smaller developers is starting to be heard as we move into the next-generation with the PS4 and Xbox One.

“A generation ago indie developers would’ve been in a certain place in the food chain in terms of consoles,” said lead designer Andrew Crawshaw. “Their voice is being heard now.”