Street cred and hors d’oeuvres – outside the occasional pastry-chef turf wars in the back alleys of Paris, these terms are rarely seen together. Yet somehow, both were mentioned in reference to Sony’s strategy in regards to independent game developers, as seen in this Wired article by Chris Kohler.

The hors d’oeuvres part comes from John Hight, the director of product development at Sony. He’s making reference to customers showing a keen interest in downloading $10 games, on top of the more “epic” $60 retail purchases. And who makes these cheap little games? Mostly independent developers, an ever-growing force in the game making space. Attracting these game developers to the Sony platform is what gives Sony the “boutique street cred”… which allows them to serve the hors d’oeuvres. Or something like that.

There are a few interesting quips in the article. One is the statement that PS3 has apparently become a hotbed for indie content, while Microsoft and Nintendo have been more walled off to indy developers. As I believe I’ve referenced before, this is a weeeee bit of change for Sony, which has traditionally been on the wrong side of the wall in such comparisons. However, I know that Microsoft has a fairly well developed strategy on this front, and some of the early results can be seen at the DreamBuildPlay warm-up challenge… so the jury remains out on wins this space. Regardless, Microsoft and Sony battling over who can open up and attract the independents is kind of cool.

It’s also worth noting that Hight emphasizes that some of the $10 games are “highly profitable” for Sony, and the indy game developers are raking in the royalties. The latter point is particularly important, as too often we see “wikinomics business models” where companies aren’t willing to share the long-term rewards with their collaborators – it’s either a one-off contest or worse.

Finally, I’ll leave you with what I found to be a very interesting tidbit in relation to creativity and innovation:

Establishing relationships with indie developers can also pay off in the creativity department. Sony’s Hight calls indie game creation “a great training ground for fresh new talent.”

“New ideas tend to come from people who have some grasp of the whole picture: technology, design, art, sound,” he says. Gamemakers working on massive games like God of War aren’t able to get their fingers into every pie, says Hight, because on such huge projects, jobs become “very specialized.”