Publishers Pressuring MS To Push Indies From Xbox Live?

R. Dobbs writes "Microsoft has reportedly drastically reduced the amount of indie titles it's going to allow on its Live Arcade service — but no such limits have been placed on material from major publishers. Have the publishers themselves been pushing this agenda? And what will it mean for indies? Quoting: 'More and more indie developers are being created, bucking the trend of working for the blockbuster-sized titles of many publishers and opting to control their own development and keep their IPs. This is likely becoming more and more of a concern to major publishers, who seem — especially in ZeniMax's recent purchase of id Software and EA's combination of Bioware and Mythic, as well as Warner Bros. purchase of Midway's IPs and studios — to be doing everything they can to consolidate their power and lock down all the available resources.' When questioned, Microsoft released a statement saying that they're 'a great supporter of independent game development.'"

Comments

As usual..

[QuietLagoon]

.... Microsoft's PR statements do not reflect the reality of what is actually occurring.

Re:As usual..

[Xest]

As usual a drama is being made out of nothing, with a bit of Microsoft blame added in for the sake of hating Microsoft.

Microsoft will publish whichever games are going to net them most profit, just like any other company would. If large companies have more resources to produce better titles than indies, that sucks for indies, but it's not really Microsoft's problem. They still provide the community games option for titles who want to publish but don't make the cut for a full arcade title.

Microsoft's primary goal is to produce profit, it's secondary goal is providing a good service to it's users. The latter can of course effect the former. But here's the real problem, publish indie games for the sake of publishing indies games purely so indies get a fair share of the market regardless of equality fails in both respects - it means less profit, and a worse selection of games for users if better games by big publishers are pushed back to make way for lower quality games by indies.

With XNA GSE and Community games Microsoft's gone out of it's way more than any other company with involvement in the games industry (with the exception of perhaps Garagegames) to make sure anyone can publish. At the end of the day, indie games that beat big publisher games still get published - Braid being a good example, but Live Arcade being flooded with the crap that comes between Braid and the likes just for the sake of someone's arbitrary assumption that there should be some balanced ratio between big publisher games and indie games is a stupid idea. If anything I'd argue too much gets published to Live Arcade as is, there's simply too much on there to search through now, it's no suprise that competition is getting tougher and the people with more resources and more professional experience are beating the others out then.

Being an indie developer doesn't give you some magical right to be given an artificial advantage in the marketplace. You still have to compete on your merits.

Re:As usual..

[Mattsson]

...if better games by big publishers are pushed back to make way for lower quality games by indies.

The question is; Why would games by big publishers be pushed back by Microsoft also offering games by small publishers?

Re:As usual..

[Lifyre]

You can only show so many titles on a screen at once. Every game, every title, and every product has to fight for that space. The closer you are to the front the more likely you are to be seen.

Re:As usual..

[Xest]

Because of the afformentioned problem of people being swamped with titles. It becomes impossible to organise if you have thousands and thousands of titles.

When you release 1 or 2 titles a week most people have time to play the trials of each of them. If you release 10 a week, people will no longer have time to play the trials. They may try the trials of one or two games that "sound" good, but turn out to be crap and so don't buy them, whilst simultaneously missing the trials of games that they would in fact have liked that week. If they stick to just releasing the good titles more people will have chance to try the trials of those good titles and will more likely purchase them due to their higher quality.

Flooding the market certainly wont help them improve profitability and again, it certainly wont help the user experience. If people start seeing a ton of crap on Live Arcade, they may even stop bothering to look at it at all.

Again, Microsoft have the community games section for low quality stuff, they don't mix it with the main arcade for exactly these reasons - they don't want the lower quality of "everyone can publish" bringing their main arcade section into disrepute so sensibly give it a section of its own.

Re:As usual..

[Miseph]

No, he's saying that the people looking at the store can't possibly follow thousands of titles assaulting their eyeballs at once. They didn't actually get rid of the indie games section, they just aren't bending over backwards to promote shitty indie titles over major publishers' that sell better. I'm sure they have no problem with hyping the really good indie titles, I'd even suspect that they stand to make more money per unit on indie titles and would make a killing if one of them became a blockbuster smash hit, but 99.9% of the indie titles out there are amateurish dreck.

Keep in mind that they're actually selling two products here: games to the consumer, and game sales to the publisher. They need the latter to get the former, and they can't get it if they are unable to demonstrate an ability to promote... if they start pushing a bunch of crap that won't sell, that's a lot of bad data points.

It's a CONSPIRACY! Or... not.

[girlintraining]

Umm, guys? Indie titles get crapped on because they're small, not because of some conspiracy. Large businesses simply don't want to expend the resources and time to make things available for the "little guys", because the net return is so much lower. I mean, hey -- if I can corner 90% of the market by setting up my distribution platform to, say, seven businesses, why should I make that same effort fifty or a hundred times more just to get that extra 10%? I think, if I were in that position, I'd just move on to the next thing and save my money. And yes, it's all electronic. That doesn't make it zero-cost; There's administrative costs to everything and those costs don't go up in a linear fashion as you add more members.

Re:It's a CONSPIRACY! Or... not.

[gandhi_2]

xbl has done a pretty good job of streamlining the indie-game process. They've made it simple enough that allowing indie-devs to publish games equates to almost NO EXTRA WORK on the part of MS. Which is smart.

Of course there are admin costs, but dev fees and sales quite handily make up for that. The fact is, putting a limit on the number of indie games is an active act, requiring work. The end result can only have lead to lower indie sales.

I agree with you that some people look for the conspiracy everywhere, but in this case MS took an action that would lead to less indie sales. I can only think that was in response to some external stimuli (major game publishers).

Re:It's a CONSPIRACY! Or... not.

[Locutus]

if just half the people who call various explanations for Microsofts actions _conspiracy theories_ read just a small number of the various court documents showing their pattern of extremely aggressive business methods, we'd see a large drop in that phrase being used. Taking a shot at what motivates Microsoft can be done with no background on how they've operated in the business for over 20 years or with a great understanding of how they work and what motivates them. Most of the time, peolple who pull out the 'that's just a conspiracy theory' are just plain ignorant to most of what's happened at the hands of Microsoft's business methods.
 

In business, I've heard of the 80-20 rule to maximize profits in tough times or when you're looking to sell a business. The theory goes, most businesses make 80% of their profits from 20% of their customers so massive short term savings can be obtained by only spending resources on those 20%. It's short term because in those other 80% providing only 20% of the profits are a few customers who will replace some in the 20% as customers fail and customers grow up. Microsoft is showing signs of cutting expenses in this economy when they have never done that in the past. Are they reducing Indies on their platform because it'll save expenses? Could be but I doubt it given how automated it has been said it is and there is some income from that sector. But maybe it just looks automated and really there are dozens and dozens of Microsoft employees at terminals banging away on the keyboards to keep it looking like it's automated? ;-) Maybe they've got to reduce staff further so the Indies must go too. lol
 

LoB
 

Re:It's a CONSPIRACY! Or... not.

[drinkypoo]

I feel like you've missed the mark substantially. The problem isn't with the idea that these are conspiracy theories, but with the idea that a conspiracy theory is automatically flawed. In reality, any time two people get together to bone at least one other person out of something, it's a conspiracy.

Don't attack the idea that Microsoft's plans for world domination are conspiracy theories; that is precisely what they are. However, they are also well-founded.

It would not surprise me at all if Microsoft were deliberately throttling game submissions to serve first-string developers. The most successful indie developers will have the opportunity to be sucked up into the system that pays Microsoft a fat licensing fee for every title sold. Microsoft isn't in business to help indie gaming, they're in business to make a profit. The indie games available on Live are only there so long as they support the bottom line in some way.

Re:Well

[omeomi]

Unfortunately, XBox Live games are way easier to produce--using the free XNA toolkit--than Wii or PS3 games. You can make a game for both PC and XBox Live at the same time, with the same codebase...

Just like the music industry

[nurb432]

They don't like independents.

Re:Well

[Toonol]

Unfortunately, the 360 is FAR easier to develop for. That and PC are almost the only possible choice for the independent developer... unless they want to do iTunes apps, or something. The Wii and PS3 just aren't really approachable except by a select few.

I would LOVE for the Wii to open up a marketplace (something much bigger than its WiiWare category), but I don't think it's something Nintendo would do.

Thank you everyone who made this possible

[pizzach]

Looks like game developers have finally grown big enough to start considering building their own RIAA/MPAA. I just want to say thanks to the people who only buy games that they have heard of through commercials of or only buy sequels. I also want to thank the graphics whores who only support games that a mega company could afford to make. Without you guys, none of this would be possible. (This also counts for presidential elections etc...)

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Locked down?

It is 99.00 a year to be able to publish content, but there are no restrictions (other than pornography or IP infringement) that will prevent you from putting your title up on the XNA indie site. Microsoft has said they will not make any judgements regarding playability, asthetics, etc.... Basically anyone can write something and have it appear in the XNA indie catalog. You don't get access to all of the XBLA APIs specifically the achievement system) but other than that you're good to go.

Support of indie developers has become a catch phrase that the top three (MS, Sony and Nintendo) have tossed about at conferences like a ping pong ball. Sony has made tons of noise recently that they are courting indie developers - this is largely bull shit. Unless your team has $250K in the bank and a string of commercial titles, you have virtually zero chance of getting a dev kit. I've had less exposure to the Nintendo process but I believe it is similar. Really, the only companies to back up support for indie developers have been Microsoft via XNA and Apple with the iPhone.

As an aside, this highlights a huge problem with blogs as opposed to traditional news media. I've seen the Sony Indie comments all over the place but no one takes any time to dig even a tiny, tiny bit beneth the surface to see what Sony has really done for the indie community.

Most Indie Titles Suck

[popo]

Before you mod this as flamebait, please read this whole post:
.
As an indie developer myself, I've been somewhat appalled by the utter lack of quality among indie games. We live in a world where there are hundreds of thousands of beautifully designed "indie" websites, but when it comes to indie games, we're apparently supposed to pretend that professional-quality design is something that requires lots of money. We're asked to somehow equate "indie" with "unprofessional".
.
This is not only bullsh*t, but it's a disaster for everyone.
.
The problem with indie games on X-Box Live is that Microsoft has utterly failed at creating a Darwinian process of user reviews, and user promotion. Because users can't rate games (or vote to have them removed), we end up with an enormous amount of "noise" on X-Box Live. Users are confronted with dozens of truly sub-par, poorly designed games, and given no way to filter the best of the best.

This lack of promotion/filtration disincentivizes both indie and commercial game developers alike, because they end up with something akin to the AppStore-Problem -- which is a glut of too many sub-standard titles.

We don't need more restrictions on indie developers. What we need is quality control, and it needs to be done by (and for) the community.

Re:Marketing a sofa multiplayer game for the PC?

[VJ42]

So what would be a good way to market a console-style multiplayer game for the PC?

You don't. You market it for a console, you could even use xbl. If it's good enough it'll be published, if not it won't. Remember that you don't have an automatic right to be published (just ask the millions of unpublished authors out there).

Re:Game Flood

[MikeBabcock]

... and having a voting column to show how many users play which games how often and/or what they've rated each game would be hard why?

Sort the games into categories like "new this week" or "popular this week" and "most popular of all time" and you won't have a problem.