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MS To Indie Devs: You Have a To Have a Publisher
Loadmaster writes "The new Oddworld game New 'n' Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One. It's not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn't porting the game. It's not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it's that Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops, Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace their console."
Wow, I thought the negatives for Xbox One couldn't be any more before it got launched. Did Sony get a leak of Microsoft's plans and then decide to do the opposite? 1) Make PS4 cheaper, 2) Not require constant internet connection, 3) Allow used games, 4) Push for indie games.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Why do dev companies even need publishers? Serious question, what do publishers bring to the table?
What about Minecraft then? Mojang surely is self-publishing that. I suppose it's just a case of MS not being THAT dumb to reject Minecraft...
Except that indie games can publish on the Wii U and PS4 without a publisher.
So no, that's just how it is in Microsoftland. Unless you're making a game for the Windows Store, which also doesn't need a publisher.
Or if you're Minecraft, which doesn't need a publisher because Microsoft threw their own rules out the window to get it.
That's one great set of rules MS has, where they're so good they keep getting rid of them.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Brian Provinciano held a great presentation at GDC2013 about writing and releasing Retro City Rampage. Required watching/reading. One Man, 17 SKUs: Shipping on Every Platform at Once. He does not have many good things to say about working with MS on the XBox Live version.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
The article tells you Oddworld:New and Tasty needs an official publisher to release on XBox, it tells you that Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning doesn't want to get a publisher, and it tells you why he doesn't want to get a publisher (he doesn't want to split the revenue), but it doesn't tell you Oddworld Interactive doesn't count as a publisher.
They clearly don't meet some requirement. Is the requirement stupid and obsolete (ie: the ability to ship boxed games), or is it reasonable (ie: the ability to correctly charge sales tax/VAT)? If it's not reasonable is it trivial?
What planet have you been living on?
First Sony said a couple of months before the Other OS removal they wouldn't be removing it. Then on an April 1st release they removed it. Everyone just thought it was a joke until it was too late for a lot of people. Sony made it MANDATORY because you either had to update and lose the Other OS feature, or you couldn't use the console to connect to PSN (meaning you lost access to any games you bought online), play newer bluRays or newer games. Either way, doing the update or not, you lost something you bought the console to do.
As I've said probably a dozen times in the last few weeks. My console was updated, not by me, when I had some people over to watch a RENTED movie. The movie required a BluRay update, which updated the console.
Sony was not up front about removing the Other OS, they lied about it profusely and tried to trick, and ultimately forced, PS3 owners to update. Linux was an awesome feature to have on my PS3 and I did a lot of stuff with it, but anyone that didn't update is now stuck with an overpriced ($800 when I bought mine), under powered, locked down Linux machine.
Microsoft is a sinking ship, there is no salvage.
From this point of view (not allowing independent games) this is a very well reasoned observation.
Or maybe we can say
Xbone is a sinking ship, there is no salvage.
An ecosystem is done or killed by the software it delivers.
To be interesting for a publisher (or for a self-publshing aka "indie" developer) that ecosystem needs to have a big number of applications.
Take the iOS and Android ecosystems: they have been great for gaming[1] because they just brought software to millions of people, and publishing on either app store or google play wasn't neither hard nor costly. The console gaming market has been bleeding money either towards the zyngalike games[2] or the smartphone gaming ecosystem. If this were 2006, Microsoft could have positioned the xbone like PS3 without taking a big hit, but now with indies and the other dumb attempt to kill off the disk-as-content-key delivery model it's hard to believe the 'bone will have some relevance in the future home gaming market.
Note: in my opinion mobile gaming will never completely kill console gaming off, but Microsoft should rapidly scale its ambitions down and at least allow indie developers on xbone. I don't believe the other propositions given by xbone (being a media center without DVR functions) will ever matter enough for getting gamer money, but maybe I'm wrong.
[1] for some kinds of gaming: sporadic, easy to get in and to get off. [2] even if the Zynga fremium model does not grow with the userbase as hoped, so it is flawed.
And also missing the fact that Jobs, love him or hate him (and I'm not a fanboy--I don't own even a single piece of Apple gear), was a genius with an uncanny feel for what would sell. It's too soon to tell, but Apple may be at the beginning of finding out what happens when you pursue that strategy without that kind of genius.
No, it didn't. There seems to be some confusion in this thread. The patch publishing fee was for XBox Live Arcade or retail games.
I think the reason Microsoft has ditched indie games is that they turned it into a failure themselves.
All the really really good indie games got given full Live Arcade publishing rights by Microsoft. XNA ran on a version of the .NET CLR but Microsoft ended up creating an implementation of it that worked for Live Arcade games and a simple API that extended XNA to allow for achievements and so forth so that indie games could be ported to Live Arcade extremely trivially.
The net result was that the only thing that ended up in indie games was complete and utter shit and as such it wont have made Microsoft even close to the amount of money required to maintain it and to maintain XNA too, hence what is I suspect the whole reason XNA has been EOL'd for a while and indie games is going too on the new XBox. It wasn't helped by the fact that in one of the dashboard updates Microsoft hid indie games so far out the way in the menus few people found it.
But what's stupid is that Microsoft seem to have forgotten that even though it wasn't profitable in itself it was still the catalyst for the creation of all those games that got turned into fully fledged Live Arcade titles.
I suspect someone from finance has looked at the balance sheet and seen that indie games/XNA wasn't profitable in itself without having even the slightest understanding of how important it was for driving XBox Live Arcade revenues. Had those Live Arcade revenues from games ported from Indie games to Live Arcade been attributed to Indie rather than Live Arcade I'd wager it was profitable, just not on paper.
Wow, speaking of lying ... apparently the stuff they demoed at E3 wasn't even running on an XBox 1, but a Win 7 box.
If that's true, it's both crapware and vaporware.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.