As for those tweets earlier tonight, I posted that because I genuinely had a good talk with Chris Charla. It wasn't awkward or upset, just congratulations with the announcements and some talk about the whole thing that went down. After that, we switched back to talking future plans and Nuclear Throne. It was super pleasant, especially considering we had just semi-broken NDA (apparently Microsoft had already mentioned launch parity before, so I guess legally we're fine anyway) and told them how that deal came to be.
If Microsoft had thrown any threats around, you'd be reading about those in the press right now. We really don't take lightly to legal nonsense like that. If we gave at all about Microsoft getting upset we would not have mentioned that story at all, but we don't, really. We care about letting the indie developer scene know what string are attached to which deal. If Sony ever turns sour, we'll let you know. If OUYA is being a pain, we'll let you know. We like transparency. Our whole involvement at ID@Xbox is trying to go through the gauntlet to let developers know what's what. So far, with the exception of the parity clause, our experiences have been quite positive.
You got to hand Chris that compared to the situation a year ago it's sort of amazing that at this point we're talking specific points of improvement over 'well, Microsoft is anti-indie'. The thing is that Chris Charla genuinely cares about indie games. We've been quite happy with how things at ID@Xbox are going so far, we received our dev-kits last week and the team has been super responsive and pro-active. We obviously don't have the level of trust with them that we have with Sony (and it might be that we never will, because we really love Shuhei, Adam, Shahid, Nick and their teams at Sony) - but we do trust that the folks at the ID@Xbox program are trying to do the right thing here. We don't know what caused this particular clause in the contract, but we do believe (and this is based on nothing) that if they could get rid of it, they would.
We'll continue to argue with Microsoft to try and convince them to drop launch parity, because it'd be a shame if we could only release future titles through ID@Xbox through a contractual exception to be negotiated on a case-per-case basis. It would be stupid if games have to be delayed on one platform because of another. It is wrong for a platform to think that they have the position to affect, by default, how someone does business with another platform. If somehow, they can be convinced to drop that, that'd remove one of the really problematic aspects of the program.
In the meanwhile, we're also just really happy that Nuclear Throne is doing so well on Steam Early Access and working with the amazing team at Sony to get LUFTRAUSERS to Vita and PS3 and Nuclear Throne to PS4 and Vita. For Nuclear Throne, it's nice that we now have the time to develop the game properly for all platforms, including Xbox One.
In the end, it does seem that openness is always the best option, but instead of simply slamming ID@Xbox as a bad program for this one clause, we like to see if we can improve those sort of flaws from the inside. As you noticed we do feel we have the moral obligation to be open about our experiences if those affect others in any way. In the end, we do want to see ID@Xbox succeed. We want games on there to be successful. But we don't want them to be successful because of Microsoft, we want them to be successful for the indie scene. The more available development platforms that treat indie developers as a serious part of their business, the better. While there are some flaws left, ID@Xbox is a really, really big step in that direction.
Basically, the reason I'm typing this is because ID@Xbox isn't "all bad" and I just felt it'd be fair to at least offer that perspective for a moment.
That's all for fireside talking with grandpa Rami about indie games today, I guess. I'd love to spend some more time on GAF, but making games as a two-man team sort of confines me to one social medium (and that ended up being my Twitter) and my metric ton of e-mail. If anybody has any questions or so, feel free to throw them that way. We love this place and super-thank you for all the support over the years <3
