Walled garden is a term for something that operates in a closed environment. For example, when you have to buy proprietary accessoriy for something that you can easily buy a third-party one for, and when the said hardware is in complete control of the manufacturer, it is said to be “closed”.
With the PS3, Sony allowed you to install Linux (not anymore) and allowed you to change the hard drive without buying expensive ones, and it was something that was a complete change when you consider the PSP which came with memory sticks or the Vita.
Sony wants to change this reputation of making closed devices. Here’s what Adam Boyes, vice president of publisher relations at Sony, had to say.
“Back in the PlayStation 2 days and the PlayStation Portable days, you had to be a full-blown publisher to get your content out to stores. Now we have the PlayStation Network and other digital destinations where people can purchase content,” he told VentureBeat.
“Originally, we had a different policy on free to play. Now we have free-to-play content and microtransactions. We used to have certain requirements for publishing. Now we have none for developers to publish other content. You have to go through the process of submitting for concept approval, but all of these things are things that have naturally evolved over the console life cycle. We’re evolving more than ever now because the industry is evolving.
“I think there are a lot of examples in the Sony ecosystem, both in the first-party and the third-party, where we’ve already been changing and evolving our platform quite a bit.”
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