Trophies and Remote Play are mandatory for all PS4 titles to pass certification.
Speaking on a Machinima livestream demoing the free-to-play Blacklight Retribution for PS4, one of the questions that Zombie Studio’s Jared Gerritzen was asked viewers was if the shooter would have trophies.
“Yeah, I think that’s the only way we can pass certification, is if we have trophies,” answered Gerritzen. “We have to have trophies. When you put a game on a console, you actually have to pass cert. So everyone’s allowing indie games… okay, so say you guys have a game you want to put on the console. You have to get it tested and certify it as well.
“So I can’t just throw a game at either one of the console companies and say ‘just put it on because you let indie game development on’. You have to pass cert. That’s the barrier and that’s the wall that you need to go past.
“Cert is that there are X, Y and Zs that you have to make sure that you do. So for example, PlayStation, we have to have use of the controls and different features that they want. We have to have Remote Play. That’s part of certification. And I believe trophies are part of certification as well.”
He later mentions that Sony is changing its policy with regards to patching, as is Microsoft.
The full livestream of Blacklight Retribution is below.