Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
The only thing they can do now is
buy a spaceship, recruit a crew and do random jobs about the galaxy. Get attacked by criminals and savages, harbor known fugitives.
But they'll still be flying.
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.
MS are the reason Firefly was canceled.
They don't like independents.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
You'll need the $100 a year developer subscription if you want to play/test your stuff on the real hardware, or play 'unpublished' games, and it's severely locked down (Much like running homebrew on the PS3).
Still, just the piece of kit an indie developer needs: Cheap development environment, easy distributing to a system with a huge install base.
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...)
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
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.
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.
Before you mod this as flamebait, please read this whole post:
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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".
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This is not only bullsh*t, but it's a disaster for everyone.
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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.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )