Slashdot Mirror
Devs Finally Finding Success With Xbox Indie Games
McBacon writes with this excerpt from Wired.co.uk:
"Often dismissed as a failed venture, the Xbox Indie Games programme has earned successful man-and-his-dog developers tens of thousands of pounds from sales of their homebrew games. Wired explores the success stories of this hidden marketplace. ... now, more than a year since its launch, the Xbox Indie Games are seeing something of a revival. Microsoft has made huge strides to improve the service, games are beginning to be taken more seriously and success stories are becoming more and more common. Especially for [James] Silva, a New York-based developer, who became an impromptu Indie celebrity after his game The Dishwasher won Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play competition. He says he's 'absolutely thrilled' to have seen I Maed a Gam3 w1th Zomb1es!!!1 — his latest game — become a cult hit, for gamers to flock to it in record numbers and to have sold over 200,000 copies."
ONE person managed to make money with XBox market place. Well, that's ... super. But news? Happens every day in other ventures. There's always been the suddenly-successful indie band amidst all the hyped stars, or the odd "Blair Witch" low budget movie that for some odd reason was successful.
OTOH, there are thousands making music and movies, and now games, who spend hours after hours, knowing that they will, at best, do it for their own entertainment and maybe, just maybe, get a warm meal out of it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And how long have PS3 Dev's been prospering off the excellent indie games on PSN?
The X-box equivalent for PSN is Xbox Live Arcade. Does Sony have a Xbox Indie Games equivalent? Comparing PSN with with Xbox Indie Games is not really "fair". But I guess all is fair in oven war.
About 95% of the game look like tests (___'s Pong!), rehashed crap (Super Deluxe Vibrator!), poorly cloned crap (Geometry Wars - now with less geometry!), or weird Japanese crap (dating sims, tetris with anime wizard girls, etc.). It's really difficult to get through to the good stuff.
Is that around 200,000 people were stupid enough to pay for a game with equal quality to a flash game, in fact almost every indie game on XBLA is of or lower than online flash game quality, that or are just ripoffs of geometry wars.
There are a few nice tower defense games in the indie games. I don't remember their names, but they are fun and definitely worth $1.
Sony and Nintendo have no comparable program to Microsoft's XLBIG, where hobby developers can write games with very little up-front costs and get them published on the console.
But the Wii does have the unofficial Homebrew Channel: www.wiibrew.org
As much as I hate to admit it, this is where marketing comes in. All you have to do is look at the crapfests that come from the major publishers and still pull in megasales to realize that marketing is far more important than anything intrinsic to the product itself. It's true of everything: movies, books, music, even games.
Indie products almost never have the kind of commercial success they deserve (excepting the rare cult hit) because they don't have the money to buy their way into the enormous media machines and get the exposure needed for commercial success. What pays for the all the wonderful free content available today? All the overpriced products you DO buy. They're mediocre because all the money and effort goes into massive advertising campaigns, which in turns pays for the free content you enjoy. Like Slashdot.
I bought Avatar Golf after playing the demo. I think it was 7$. You can play against others online and create your own courses. Well worth the money if you like golf type games.
This is why apple better not have a lock in app store with fees / and something like a 30% cut of sales and the apple app store censorship will just slow down people in makeing games.
A open market with no fees and no lock in / censorship. Is alot better then $99 to be able to come out with free games and even then you have to deal with censorship.
open market = more games over time vs a few good ones after a longer time.
Essentially, the author as recognised the need for games with zombies in. He has produced a game with zombies in for one dollar, which he hopes people will pay. The game features zombies shambling in from the sides, which you had better shoot lest you die.
The only part that isn't his is internationalization, and there is good reason for that.
All your base are belong to us?
You know, of course there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie games. Just like there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie movies. Just like there's only going to be a few people who really hit it big in indie music. Just like there are rarely television shows on off-brand cable networks that get the same kind of viewership that sitcoms get on network channels.
And yet, despite all of that, the FX Network picked up a pilot for a low-budget sitcom called It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and while it'll never get the viewers that Seinfeld had, it's gotten a cult audience. And occasionally a small-budget movie will win an Oscar for acting or something, and that'll drive enough people to see it to earn a profit on it. And if a local band sells 10,000 copies of their album, they're considered a success, even though big artists go platinum at 100 times that.
And so you're going to have an indie games network that's going to have a lot of trash on it that doesn't make a lot of money, but buried in there are going to be several simple games that sell 10K copies and earn their creators some spending money. That's how indie media usually works. Nothing wrong with that. (And nothing wrong with I Maed a Game With Zombies, either. That friggin' song gets stuck in my head a lot.)
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
True, XNA is a big improvement over the other consoles, but it's still not perfect. There are two major things you can't do with XNA: synthesize the speech of game characters (there's no streaming PCM API) or write text in the languages of fictional cultures in your game (your game will fail peer review if Microsoft's criteria are to be believed).
There are 100k+ of apps, many of which (2nd highest percentage wise) are games. I'm fairly sure that if anything, Apple will be looking to create more slowdown with higher fees and/or more hurdles to jump. So much of it is shovelware that it's making it hard to find the good from the bad, so if Apple can find a way to ... discourage ... the bad devs and encourage the good ones who are truly in it for both the money *and* the desire to provide a high-quality product (2nd one's important, too!) they would probably take that method in a heartbeat. Even if it meant less apps getting made and posted in the store.
For 9 months me and two other devs worked on a tetris like game only to wait another 6 months for it to get approved, then be taken down with no notification in two days.
C# was great but the XNA community blew chunks.
It was like having your game reviewed by 3 year olds.
The xbox was easy to develop for but the whole submital process made me go insane. I will never develop on XBOX community games again.
Quality English there, Joe The Dragon. Quality nick name too.
My Xbox Indie Game, You Will Die, just got accepted to the Twin Galaxies scoreboard. They're the guys who do the official tracking of videogame world records (for example,the Donkey Kong world record from the movie King of Kong was officiated by Twin Galaxies). It's the first time an Xbox Indie game has been included in their tracking system so it seems that the platform is gaining a bit more legitamacy
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
This is a step in the right direction. Consoles are computers, and they can run all sorts of software. This service is still limited to games, and doesn't seem to allow free games to be distributed. I'm sure it's limited in other ways too, but it is much more open than what used to be allowed on a console.
Imagine if consoles offered the equivalent of Apple's App Store. Sure, the app store has frustrating limitations as well, but it does offer many interesting programs. I'd love to see popular free, cross-platform games available to play on consoles for free. I'm also curious what non-game applications might prove useful for the living room.
Of course, the console makers will resist this amount of openness, because they want to sell games. If you're spending your time on free games, you're not buying anything. But it is encouraging to see Microsoft move in this direction. If Google TV or other set top boxes take off, and they allow the user to run any Android based software, the console makers may be forced to open up their platforms in order to compete.
So in other words, the dictionary has to be kept a trade secret. This means anyone could get the game pulled from the marketplace merely by playing the game, compiling a dictionary, and publishing it on GameFAQs, as has been done for the Hamtaro games on GBC and GBA.