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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."
Microsoft is a sinking ship, there is no salvage.
This is just Microsoft protecting their own turf. This is part of their culture. As a publisher they feel they must prevent anything that might jeopardize that income. Most companies would not go this far, but Microsoft has a culture of "cutting off their nose to spite their face."
One of the main issue with "consoles" is that it really is controled by a bunch of sociopath focusing on how to put the maximum of toll boths to efficiently bleed the marcs..
Under the pretext of make the experience "safe", you need the get some sort of "authorisations" from the console makers, and now it seems that Microsoft feels strong (or is weak) enough to add an additional hurdle to avoid "wasting their time" with the unwashed masses.
I hope that "android" consoles become popular (and that it will not end up with Google doing exactly the same thing M$ is doing ....
Might as well be a total asshole.
"Developers creating work-for-hire for official publishing channels! Developers creating work-for-hire for official publishing channels! Developers creating work-for-hire for official publishing channels!"
I am not a crackpot.
Why do dev companies even need publishers? Serious question, what do publishers bring to the table?
DeVelOpERs! deveLOpErS! dEVLopeRS! deVelo....
Oh sorry, not for you guys.
--
BMO
Microsoft has a culture of "cutting off their nose to spite their face."
No they don't they are simply the same bullying Abusive Monopoly they always are. There technique is abusive compromise...with the users doing all the compromising. They start with being over-reaching...and then step back ( a little) when users revolt, and repeat at the next iteration. IT has been incredibly successful at slowly eroding users rites.
Indie publishers got the short end of the stick on the 360 this is simply a continuation of that. my personal favourite http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/07/20/1540247/microsoft-taking-heat-for-five-figure-xbox-360-patch-fee the patch fee :)
They been making so many bad moves in the last few years, I'm beginning to think this is some elaborate game to intentionally run the company off a cliff. Surely to god, they can't be doing all this dumb shit and actually thinking it's smart. Can they?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
No but this article says the Indie section is going away:
Yesterday, Microsoft's Studios corporate vice president Phil Harrison told Eurogamer that the marketplace on the company's new Xbox One console would combine retail games, Xbox Live Arcade, and Xbox Live Indie Games into a single section. . . With the Indie Games section going away, that means developers are stuck with the standard Xbox publishing rules.
So yes, indie games will need a publisher which sorta not makes them indie anymore. This might be a misunderstanding but Oddworld seems to think they are being forced to use a publisher. MS might have to clarify this point. There is a need for a publisher in games mostly for funding; however, Oddworld is self-funded. They don't feel like sharing revenue and profits when they don't have to share.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
MS used to have XNA, and basically let anyone publish on the 360 with just a $100 a year license. Not sure why they abandoned such a forward-thinking program. But it does fit in with the general MS stance of making every fucking wrong move imaginable over the last 3-4 years, and scrapping every decent idea they ever had.
Sometimes I think Blamer has secretly gone nuts, and no one has the balls to have him committed. It would certainly explain why he's absent from MS public events these days. But at least Howard Hughes was smart enough to delegate well after *he* went batshit. Balmer, by contrast, seems determined to not only collect all his urine in jars, but also to run his company off the cliff.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
From the look of it, they're trying to make the Xbox One as "big publisher" friendly as possible..... basically doing the stuff of wet dreams of EA, Ubisoft, and all those other big names.
Unfortunately they forgot that they have to sell some consoles too, else it won't do much.
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.
Minecraft got a special sweetheart deal from Microsoft that throws most of the indie restrictions out the window. They also don't have to pay to post patches, unlike others (who pay tens of thousands of dollars, something no other platform is doing to indies anymore).
Microsoft's idea of "supporting indie games" is to find ones that got mainstream already and exempt them from the rules. Which is a sure sign that the rules are crap, but you know. This is Microsoft we're talking about.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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?
Sony also made new PS3 disc games require Other OS-incompatible firmware, which defeated the purpose of Other OS which was to have Linux and games on one device. If people knew that they'd have to keep one PS3 for Other OS and buy a second PS3 for playing new games, they would have bought a PC instead in the first place.
Toward this, see the entry for "Getting Crap Past the Radar" in TV Tropes' article about Battle Chess .
To be able to publish on XBox Live Arcade, you have to have published at least 3 disc based games for the XBox 360.
See link below. Also, Microsoft pledged to have a independent creator program and is rumored to announce a new Xbox developer program at the BUILD developer conference on June 26th.
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JamesSilva/20130523/192832/Were_Indie_we_like_Microsoft_Too_Controversial.php
wrote this post on our blog a few months ago to express how absolutely weird and unfortunate I thought it was that the trending perception of Microsoft and indies had gotten so bad that silly creative decisions of mine were being taken as Microsoft's ever-burgeoning evilness toward indies, or something. My message was this: we're indie, we make the games we want to make, Microsoft publishes them, and the past five years of this have been great, and it's too bad that that's not super newsworthy, because this whole time it just feels like I must watch, powerless, as Lumbergh keeps taking my red stapler.
Then Xbox One happened, and a longtime fan of ours posted this on my facebook wall:
Questionable grammar aside, I was super glad he posted this, because through no fault of his own he's unwittingly illustrated what happens when these narratives blow up. You know that thing about no self-publishing on Xbox One? The meaning of that quote was that the partner/publisher relationship is currently the same (i.e. what we, an indie studio, been doing for the last five years) but they're exploring ways to improve it. Basically "everything's the same, stay tuned for improvements" mutated into "no indies on Xbox One, ever" in a few hours.
Finally, a disclaimer: I do not think there is a vast conspiracy to unjustly villify Microsoft. That would be weird, possibly an indicator of neurosis, even. I just wish I could add my "everything is fine" experience to the mix more often.
And with that, here's the original post:
In Charlie Murder, the whole band gets Windows Phones on the fictional t2f (short for ta2fön) network. There’s a bunch of stuff you can use your phone for, like email (some of it rote, some of it interesting), camera phone, and squid-themed microblogging site squ.iddl.us. I thought it was a fun way to give your characters a bit of an info hub, and I’ve been a big fan of Windows Phone ever since my Samsung Focus and its marvelous bulging battery bomb (that’s another story). Also, we have a game on Windows Phone, and we definitely make a buck or two whenever someone buys it, so that’s cool. Yet still, I felt the need to tweet this:
In the comments in Joystiq’s rad Charlie Murder preview write up, there were a few begrudging Microsoft for what was (erroneously) interpreted as some sort of paid off order from up high to include the phone in the game. This is obviously entirely untrue; if anyone’s guilty of some sort of slimy promotion, I guess that would be me, as I’d like to get more people interested in a pretty solid other alternative to iPhone (and, again, we’ve got Z0MB1ES on dat ph0ne!!!1)
But I think this illuminates an underlying issue, namely that of Microsoft’s misunderstood role as indie games publisher, and how that ties to the trending media narrative on Microsoft being “bad for indies.” Where do we stand on all this? Read on:
So, Microsoft is publishing Charlie Murder. What does that mean? Here are a few facts to set the record straight:
We have full creative control. This is our game. 100% of the (non-localized) content in Charlie Murder was made by Michelle and me, or, in a few cases, by a few gaming celebrities who we got some rad cameos from (yes, celebrities).
Ska Studios is just Michelle and me. We work in our basement. We have two cats (you knew that).
Microsoft gives us localized text from our English text, finds bugs, tells us how to fix bugs when we’re stumped, tells us how close to passing cert we are, and takes us out to din
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.