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Where's the signup page to become a PS3 minis developer? This press release mentions "SCEA Third Party Relations", but all I get when I visit the URL in the press release is "YOU ARE NOT AUTHORISED TO ACCESS THIS SITE".

Excuse me, but there is an indie scene even on PS3.

The web site to sign up for PS3 development, linked from this press release, has been down for nine months.

And you left out tablets, which will have a huge indie scene if not already. And what is limited about PCs and phones?

Have you ever tried to key in a phone number on your iPhone or Android phone without looking at its display? If so, how often did you get it right on the first try? The iPhone, the iPad, Android phones, and Android tablets rely exclusively on touch input. In a game that uses multitouch to emulate a gamepad, the player has no way to feel over which of the on-screen buttons his thumbs rest. There exists a device called the iControlPad, but almost nobody owns one, and it's far too expensive to bundle with a copy of a game.

As for PCs, the limitation is the average size of the monitor to which a PC is connected. PC gamers are traditionally unwilling to connect a large monitor and two to four gamepads to a PC. CronoCloud has told me repeatedly that if I develop and self-publish a PC game designed for use with a large monitor and two to four gamepads, it will sell fewer than one dozen copies.

I admit that I was extrapolating from Nintendo's qualifications document (on warioworld.com) because I couldn't find any qualifications document on Sony's web site. This Sony press release mentions a web site that has been unavailable for over seven months.

Sony has in fact supported smaller studios before

So how does one sign up? As I said above, the TPR web site linked from this press release has been down for four months.

Thankfully it seems we are getting a resurgence of the "shareware" era, this time via steam and the download channels of the xbox360 and ps3.

Xbox 360 I'll grant you because it has Xbox Live Indie Games. But where is the form to sign up for SCEA's PLAYSTATION 3 developer program? http://www.tpr.scea.com, the developer relations site that this press release cites, hasn't been responding for over a month now.

Think they are talking about the developers who only do games not available on media.

You're right. Since the incident, new developers haven't even been able to sign up for PS3 devkits. A press release advertising SCEA's programs for developers mentions a web site for signing up that has been down for at least the past month.

PSN has Indie games too, they are called 'minis'

"Minis" appears to be PSN's counterpart to Xbox Live Arcade, not Live Indie Games. I'd look closer, but SCEA's site to sign up for PSP and PS3 game development (linked from the press release) has been down for over a week now, and I have trouble determining the organizational requirements to get started.

[Sony Computer Entertainment] have in fact been more open with their console then Nintendo or MS has.

How? It'd be one thing if Sony had a direct counterpart to Xbox Live Indie Games, allowing anybody to make games, run them on the console, and submit them to the console's official market. But I haven't even been able to Google up the developer qualifications for the PlayStation family platforms (this press release mentions two sites that are down at the moment), and I see no reason to believe they're materially different from Nintendo's: you have to have a corp or LLC with a dedicated office, and it has to have released a commercial title on another platform.