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[TerryWogan]

I never said it was just those.

You kinda did, else I wouldn't have even bothered replying to you in the first place:

How are leaderboards and achievements indicators of quality?

I can't remember the specifics of a podcast I heard once months ago.

Then why are you using it to support your discussion? I could just make something up entirely and that would hold similar merit.

I totally disagree. I think achievements do hurt game experiences considerably.

There's nothing stopping the guy throwing an achievement in for simply completing each stage. Gamers would've done that regardless. How can that possibly hurt the game experience?

 

[Castle Doctrine]

Blow did mention the PS3 once on the Giant Bombcast. Something like: "I can't make the exact game I want on XBLA. I would be able to on the PS3."

If I had to bet I'd say this game will release on the 360, PSN and Steam. It would be silly for him to limit his audience. Watch, after all this, Microsoft gets a timed exclusive release.

edit: Listening to that bombcast was painful because of those two X-Box guys waxing poetic about Kinect and the PR shilling all over the damn place. I mean, I know they don't really have a choice, but still, it was cringe worthy.

 

[RuGalz]

Every other day you hear devs complain about MS policies on XBLA, which really is PITA, but I always scratch my head when the same people don't just release it on PSN instead. Not to say there's no obstacles on PSN but it's not his first title so some barrier to entry is already gone.

 

[StuBurns]

You kinda did, else I wouldn't have even bothered replying to you in the first place:

No, I didn't. I mentioned two aspects that do not pertain to quality.

Then why are you using it to support your discussion? I could just make something up entirely and that would hold similar merit.

I can't even imagine how making something up is comparable to telling the truth to you, and I care even less to hear you try and explain it.

There's nothing stopping the guy throwing an achievement in for simply completing each stage. Gamers would've done that regardless. How can that possibly hurt the game experience?

If people don't feel compelled to finish the game based on the game alone, but they do from the achievements, their experience is altered. If they feel the need to finish it faster, their experience is altered. A number of similar situations could easily arise. Given the design of Braid and Blow's insistence people not use a guide, and give the puzzles as long as they need, any external force that would push a user to 'cheat' would have gone against the game design.

 

[TerryWogan]

No, I didn't. I mentioned two aspects that do not pertain to quality.

I can't even imagine how making something up is comparable to telling the truth to you, and I care even less to hear you try and explain it.

If people don't feel compelled to finish the game based on the game alone, but they do from the achievements, their experience is altered. If they feel the need to finish it faster, their experience is altered. A number of similar situations could easily arise. Given the design of Braid and Blow's insistence people not use a guide, and give the puzzles as long as they need, any external force that would push a user to 'cheat' would have gone against the game design.

Sure, "collect-em-up" cheevos and the ones that genuinely force you to complete a game in a very specific way can be distracting, but if you're suggesting that achievements encourage people to "cheat" at a game like Braid, therefore ruining their own experience, you're crazy. What we're talking about here is individual tastes. If you want the proper game experience as intended, it's your duty to just play the damn thing as intended. If you decided to cheat by looking at a guide, achievements or not, that's how you've decided to play the game. It's not even worthy of complaint.

You can't force people to play your game, watch your movie or listen to your music exactly as intended. It doesn't work like that. Achievements do little to change that at worst, and absolutely nothing to change that if the developer doesn't decide to add in "speed run" achievements, "collect-em-ups", etc. Interestingly, Braid actually had a speed run achievement.

Because XBLA sales are generally much stronger than PSN sales. Not to mention the game development itself is easier on 360 than on PS3.

And about the Bombcast, one of the main things he mentioned IIRC was that MS forces every game to have a main menu. I guess Blow doesn't want menus in his games? Sounded pretty weird to me tbh.

It sounds to me as though he created Braid without menus or any of the other usual XBLA stuff - probably going against advice to the contrary - submitted it, then had to add them all in afterwards, which was likely a royal pain in the arse. He stitched himself up for the sake of his "art", really. "I want a game with NO MENUS!" "It's a show about NOTHING!" etc. Presumably this time it won't be a problem, because he'll be smart enough to just put them in as he goes, right?

 

[Rad-]

Every other day you hear devs complain about MS policies on XBLA, which really is PITA, but I always scratch my head when the same people don't just release it on PSN instead. Not to say there's no obstacles on PSN but it's not his first title so some barrier to entry is already gone.

Because XBLA sales are generally much stronger than PSN sales. Not to mention the game development itself is easier on 360 than on PS3.

And about the Bombcast, one of the main things he mentioned IIRC was that MS forces every game to have a main menu. I guess Blow doesn't want menus in his games? Sounded pretty weird to me tbh.

 

[kassatsu]

Has there ever been revealed how much money developers make from XBLA games?

I'm doing some basic maths based on 2 Kotaku articles about Braid from 2008:

http://kotaku.com/5037392/jonathan-blow-says-he-spent-180000-on-braid
http://kotaku.com/5035752/braid-sales-surprisingly-good-but-not-yet-profitable

Basically, it cost him $180k to make the game over 3 years, and he still wasn't profitable at around 30k copies sold (he in fact needed a lot more than that), indicating that he was getting less than $6 per copy sold. That's less than 40%, if the game sold for $15.

Have things changed by now or what? Because I find that cut to be absurdly low, especially if the often rumored 70/30 split for most PC digital distributors turns out to be true.

Or am I just doing something wrong here?

At Casual Connect this year the Snoopy Flying Ace people shared numbers.

At approx 150k game units and approx 75k dlc units their net revenue was $620k.

That was after ratings, testing, pre-cert, and localization.

 

[see5harp]

Partially I would agree with him. As he said on the e3 podcast, "I want no achievements". The idea is that the way MS has achievements setup, the notification is going to popup in game by default. There's no way of either delaying it or getting rid of it all together. This isn't an issue with both Steam and iOS (where it's optional); even Sony seems more lenient on it (see Heavy Rain's exception of being able to delay it afterwards)

To me, that was his silliest complaint.

 

[StuBurns]

Sure, "collect-em-up" cheevos and the ones that genuinely force you to complete a game in a very specific way can be distracting, but if you're suggesting that achievements encourage people to "cheat" at a game like Braid, therefore ruining their own experience, you're crazy. What we're talking about here is individual tastes. If you want the proper game experience as intended, it's your duty to just play the damn thing as intended. If you decided to cheat by looking at a guide, achievements or not, that's how you've decided to play the game. It's not even worthy of complaint.

I agree to an extent.

You can't force people to play your game, watch your movie or listen to your music exactly as intended.

I totally disagree. Yes you can, and that is the fundemental concept of game design, and any other design. You are forcing the user to perform actions in a certain way. If excluding the achievements stops 1% of people having a destorted experience of the game, it was a good game design decision, and I don't think it'd be anything like that small a number. I know so many people who care deeply about achievements, it affects the way they play games. You can say they're weak willed or whatever, and that might be the case, but that is still the audience that buys these games, and the audience Blow is designing for.

I don't want to derail with my disdain towards achievements, so I'd prefer to leave that specific element here. If you wish to hear more about Blow's view, I recommend reconsidering your stance on the podcast.

http://media.giantbomb.com/podcast/giantbombcast-060611.mp3

There, you don't even have to fire up iTunes.

An aside, it's no surprise Braid's most challanging puzzles are missing from the achievements.

 

[TheFightingFish]

I can totally see cert being a huge pain for indie devs to deal with. For any level of XBLA or retail title this seems to be a very long, back and forth process where stuff gets slowly fixed over a long painful period of time. Hard for a big company, but probably hell on a single indie dev / small indie team.

On the consumer side, I do have to say that there are some parts of the XBLA requirements that I really do think benefit me. The big one that jumps to mind is demos, I totally love how everything on XBLA has to have a trial version. This is probably one of those things that every dev would "claim" that they want to do, but when the push comes to shove (as you can tell by indie games on Steam and PSN, most of which do not have demos) they won't actually take the time for it. So in this case I'm sure the cert process is a pain for indies, but a win for me as I actually get to try out all the games on the service before I buy. Still if it scares off all the indies then that is not good for XBLA either.

 

[-Pyromaniac-]

It's unfortunate to hear the stuff he says but it's also totally unsurprising, Microsoft will always be Microsoft, despite how much one might like their Xbox.

 

[TerryWogan]

I agree to an extent.

I totally disagree. Yes you can, and that is the fundemental concept of game design, and any other design. You are forcing the user to perform actions in a certain way.

I disagree right back at you. You can't FORCE someone to play your game the way you want them to. You can hold their hand, guide them, but at the end of the day people are going to do whatever the hell they want to with your game. I agree that good game design points the gamer in the right direction and allows them to experience the game as intended, but it seems to me that Blow is getting his panties in a twist because he can't force everyone to play his games the way he wants to, rather than merely guide them.

 

[BobsRevenge]

Sure, "collect-em-up" cheevos and the ones that genuinely force you to complete a game in a very specific way can be distracting, but if you're suggesting that achievements encourage people to "cheat" at a game like Braid, therefore ruining their own experience, you're crazy. What we're talking about here is individual tastes. If you want the proper game experience as intended, it's your duty to just play the damn thing as intended. If you decided to cheat by looking at a guide, achievements or not, that's how you've decided to play the game. It's not even worthy of complaint.

You can't force people to play your game, watch your movie or listen to your music exactly as intended. It doesn't work like that. Achievements do little to change that at worst, and absolutely nothing to change that if the developer doesn't decide to add in "speed run" achievements, "collect-em-ups", etc. Interestingly, Braid actually had a speed run achievement.

I think the point is that achievements as an idea are kind of opposed to Braid philosophically. They are cheap content. I feel like if a game is trying to tackle something conceptually deep, achievements cheapen the experience by imposing a more toyish experience. On Steam and PS3 you can't turn off the pop-ups, so you're stuck. Requiring them for a release on your platform is more pretentious than Blow.

I disagree right back at you. You can't FORCE someone to play your game the way you want them to. You can hold their hand, guide them, but at the end of the day people are going to do whatever the hell they want to with your game. I agree that good game design points the gamer in the right direction and allows them to experience the game as intended, but it seems to me that Blow is getting his panties in a twist because he can't force everyone to play his games the way he wants to, rather than merely guide them.

Blow does minimal guiding, though. He wants the player to experience the game fresh, to experience a sense of discovery. To feel like their accomplishments are their own. He isn't getting his panties in a twist, he just wants creative control.

 

[JaggedSac]

Partially I would agree with him. As he said on the e3 podcast, "I want no achievements". The idea is that the way MS has achievements setup, the notification is going to popup in game by default. There's no way of either delaying it or getting rid of it all together. This isn't an issue with both Steam and iOS (where it's optional); even Sony seems more lenient on it (see Heavy Rain's exception of being able to delay it afterwards)

Solution: Queue up any achievement unlocks. Store the queue in the game's gamertag storage space once the games requirement for the achievement is unlocked in case player turns off console or goes to dash. This way player doesn't lose the cheevo unlock. Once on a menu, or place he doesn't mind the notification, trigger the achievement unlocked API for that particular achievement.

If I paid money for a game for the 360, it better damn well have cheevos

 

[JesseZao]

Braid was originally published on Xbox Live Arcade by Microsoft. However, he told Gamasutra that he has not spoken to publishers about The Witness since 2009, and his understanding of the situation may be outdated.

"What that means, to have Microsoft as your publisher, I think, varies a lot from year to year, because they change policies to do whatever they think is best, to steer the service. They have personnel changes and all that. So who knows what's happening?"

I guess it's good to be forthright, but it does put his rant in a different light to me.

 

[see5harp]

I think the point is that achievements as an idea are kind of opposed to Braid philosophically. They are cheap content. I feel like if a game is trying to tackle something conceptually deep, achievements cheapen the experience by imposing a more toyish experience. On Steam and PS3 you can't turn off the pop-ups, so you're stuck. Requiring them for a release on your platform is more pretentious than Blow.

He could do something creative with achievements like make them all hidden and tie many of them to unrelated tasks on the menu bar. He could do any number of things to completely separate achievements from the actual gameplay or narrative. Requiring every game to have achievements is pretentious? What?

 

[BobsRevenge]

He could do something creative with achievements like make them all hidden and tie many of them to unrelated tasks on the menu bar. He could do any number of things to completely separate achievements from the actual gameplay or narrative. Requiring every game to have achievements is pretentious? What?

It's saying "Buying into our system of keeping people from buying games for other platforms is required for you to release anything on it, and you'll do it because we're that important."

And yeah, you can trick around with it. But I'm presenting a philosophical stance, so I'm not sure that's relevant.

 

[Princess Skittles]

I think the point is that achievements as an idea are kind of opposed to Braid philosophically. They are cheap content. I feel like if a game is trying to tackle something conceptually deep, achievements cheapen the experience by imposing a more toyish experience. On Steam and PS3 you can't turn off the pop-ups, so you're stuck. Requiring them for a release on your platform is more pretentious than Blow.

If achievements are such a horrifying detriment to the game's hipster artistic merit, why were they included in the Steam release, where they are, in fact, not required by the platform holder?

 

[epmode]

Dunno. The Braid PC port is pretty embarrassing though, if only because it doesn't have controller support.

 

[BobsRevenge]

If achievements are such a horrifying detriment to the game's hipster artistic merit, why were they included in the Steam release, where they are, in fact, not required by the platform holder?

I'm not Blow, I dunno. It probably improves sales, he already had them in, and it isn't that big of a deal? Maybe Valve has incentives?

Rohrer is still hipster enough to not include them though!

Achievements did pull me out of Limbo a bit, it was enjoyable when I accomplished them, but it sort of put a little tear in the atmosphere of it.

 

[KageMaru]

While I understand why these companies have cert processes and such, the whole business people dicking devs around is inexcusable. There really should be a fine balance between having standards and allowing some flexibility or control.

 

[StuBurns]

Dunno. The Braid PC port is pretty embarrassing though, if only because it doesn't have controller support.

Yes it does.

 

[SpaceDrake]

If achievements are such a horrifying detriment to the game's hipster artistic merit, why were they included in the Steam release, where they are, in fact, not required by the platform holder?

They were pretty much already done for the XBLA version and some people would bitch if they weren't in for the Steam version (since it'd be "inferior"), so it was more a "why not throw them in" situation, I'd expect

 

[wutwutwut]

Dunno. The Braid PC port is pretty embarrassing though, if only because it doesn't have controller support.

Joke post?

 

[epmode]

Unless I missed something, I had to use JoyToKey. I'll try again tonight!

 

[StuBurns]

Unless I missed something, I had to use JoyToKey.

I just fired it up for the first time, the first thing it did was tell me to use the left stick to move. All the 360 pad icons are in there, it's identical.

Actually the keyboard controls are a little messy, I wish I could change the time effect to something else, it's on shift. But using the mouse for the jigsaw puzzles is much nicer.

 

[wutwutwut]

though thinking about it, it might only have Xinput support. You're using an X360 or other Xinput controller, right?

 

[U2NUMB]

Is it possible that some devs are... a pain in the ass to deal with? Not sure what the truth is as we are getting one side of the story.

 

[Parallax Scroll]

lol his last name is blow

 

[epmode]

though thinking about it, it might only have Xinput support. You're using an X360 or other Xinput controller, right?

I'm using XBCD so I'll try putting the files into the Braid folder. I could have sworn it didn't work before but I guess I could have forgotten.

 

[subversus]

Is it possible that some devs are... a pain in the ass to deal with? Not sure what the truth is as we are getting one side of the story.

that's not about people, it's about stupid restrictions. XBLA can't have any problems with devs because they must follow TOS or they can fuck off.

 

[U2NUMB]

that's not about people, it's about stupid restrictions. XBLA can't have any problems with devs because they must follow TOS or they can fuck off.

I have no doubt that MS is tough to deal with on things like this and we have enough evidence to point in that direction. However.. I also bet Blow is a big pain in the ass to deal with due to his obvious ego. The talks between these two parties must be very entertaining.

 

[V_Arnold]

At the end of the day, XBLA is still the biggest place for Indie, even if Steam CAN catch up. And nobody will convince me that Braid was not succesful partly because it appeared exclusively on that platform first Steam is awesome, a lot of people use it, but XBLA games appear on the dashboard for at least 30-40 million Xbox 360 users... so yeah, that is insane to think about.

If I were Microsoft, I would protect that space as carefully as possible, cause it is like the front of a store. Important.

 

[subversus]

I have no doubt that MS is tough to deal with on things like this and we have enough evidence to point in that direction. However.. I also bet Blow is a big pain in the ass to deal with due to his obvious ego. The talks between these two parties must be very entertaining.

I doubt there were any "talks". MS funded the development. I think they were like "you do this or we don't pay you and won't publish your game".

 

[AlphaTwo00]

To me, that was his silliest complaint.

It is, and it isn't. His point was that if his game called for not having any, he wants the option not to do it. You can chalk it up to him as being stubborn, but he does have a point when the other platforms lets him do exactly the idea he wants.

Solution: Queue up any achievement unlocks. Store the queue in the game's gamertag storage space once the games requirement for the achievement is unlocked in case player turns off console or goes to dash. This way player doesn't lose the cheevo unlock. Once on a menu, or place he doesn't mind the notification, trigger the achievement unlocked API for that particular achievement.

If I paid money for a game for the 360, it better damn well have cheevos

That's specifically what he's not allowed to do, I'm pretty sure that would be against both 360 and PS3 requirements. Heavy Rain did something similar, but was an exception that Sony allowed for in a specific instance.

 

[mujun]

While I understand why these companies have cert processes and such, the whole business people dicking devs around is inexcusable. There really should be a fine balance between having standards and allowing some flexibility or control.

I wonder how many XBLA devs would say that they've been dicked around.

I think Jonathon Blow is a cool guy and all, having listened to him on a couple of podcasts, though, he comes across as someone who tends to exaggerate his complaints.

 

[AlphaTwo00]

I wonder how many XBLA devs would say that they've been dicked around.

I think Jonathon Blow is a cool guy and all, having listened to him on a couple of podcasts, though, he comes across as someone who tends to exaggerate his complaints.

See Team Meat's postmortem on SMB: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6348/postmortem_team_meats_super_meat_.php

Specifically, #5 of what went wrong:

Development was over, Super Meat Boy had taken home a few awards at PAX, and the press was starting to focus their lights on us. Many websites and magazines said Super Meat Boy was easily the hit of the Feast, and possibly the next big indie hit, but the business side of Microsoft wasn't convinced.

We were told our price was too high, our visuals too rough and simply not as eye catching and flashy as the other Game Feast games Comic Jumper and Hydrophobia. Our hearts sank when we were informed that we were projected to sell as much if not less than Hydrophobia, which would be the second-highest grossing game of the Feast in their minds.

This projection became that much more soul crushing when Hydrophobia launched and its overall leaderboard had less than 10k players in the first week. If Microsoft's projections were correct, we were fucked.

A week later, Comic Jumper launched with a similar public reaction but slightly better numbers -- still very low for XBLA standards. The Game Feast seemed to be a huge bomb, and quite a few news sites were already writing it off as a failure.

Super Meat Boy launched Oct. 20th alongside Costume Quest. It was placed third on the spotlight for four days. We never received any of the promotional launch bonuses that the previous Game Feast games had gotten (exclusive launch week, #1 spotlight, and a review by Major Nelson) but were told if we performed well in terms of Metacritic score and sales, we would move up and be more heavily advertised.

By day three of our launch, we had already outperformed Hydrophobia and Comic Jumper's launch weeks combined, our Metacritic was the second-highest rated XBLA game of all time, and the word of mouth was insane.

Our spotlight placement was gone by day five and never came back. We never got a review by Major Nelson nor did we get an explanation for why Microsoft launched SMB alongside Costume Quest, or for why, even though we exceeded their expectations for sales and score, we weren't given the treatment we were promised, even while they continued to heavily promote other Game Feast titles like Comic Jumper.

In the end, we felt very confused and taken advantage of. To this day we are still unsure of why things went down the way they did. Was it that Microsoft simply wanted to detach itself from the Game Feast? Was it that they didn't believe we would perform as well as we did? Or was it just horrible luck at the most competitive time of the year for the video game industry?

Either way, by far the biggest mistake we made during SMB's development was killing ourselves to get into a promotion we would gain basically nothing from.

 

[see5harp]

Marketing and promotion issues I can understand. I just don't understand how basically a notification popping up at a specific time hurts his vision for his game. He could even do something incredibly creative like make the achivements completely obtainable but so stupid to comment on the ridiculous nature of the system and how silly achievement hunters can be. Spend 5 hours on the menu screen without pressing a buttom or press up 1,000 times on the pause menu. Then it becomes commentary without having anything to do with the game.

 

[mujun]

See Team Meat's postmortem on SMB: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6348/postmortem_team_meats_super_meat_.php

Specifically, #5 of what went wrong:

Seems very anecdotal and subjective to me.

As a gamer I'm definitely on the side of the devs rather than that of the people making the business decisions. I'd like devs to be totally catered to and to get the exact support they want. That being said I realize that it would probably have a negative impact on business and so each platform holder needs to find a balance between keeping devs happy and doing what they consider to be the best thing for their platform.

Maybe MS does shaft devs too much. Problem is that XBLA keeps offering up so much goodness it's hard to understand why some people clamor for change so much, it's well and truly delivering already and many are making money, hence the skepticism.

 

[Rolf NB]

At the end of the day, XBLA is still the biggest place for Indie

Is this proof by repeated assertion?

 

[tiff]

Marketing and promotion issues I can understand. I just don't understand how basically a notification popping up at a specific time hurts his vision for his game. He could even do something incredibly creative like make the achivements completely obtainable but so stupid to comment on the ridiculous nature of the system and how silly achievement hunters can be. Spend 5 hours on the menu screen without pressing a buttom or press up 1,000 times on the pause menu. Then it becomes commentary without having anything to do with the game.

I think Blow fancies himself an artsy kind of guy, and I don't think it's too unheard of for people like him to get caught up over details like some immersion-breaking notification popping up when he doesn't want it too.

And I'm sure Microsoft would be pretty pissed if he just fucking with the achievements.

 

[LiK]

Stuburns posted the podcast but this is better.

WATCH Blow confront Stepto about it from the Giantbomb E3 special. It's good.

http://www.justin.tv/giantbomb/b/287535269

 

[AlphaTwo00]

Seems very anecdotal and subjective to me.

As a gamer I'm definitely on the side of the devs rather than that of the people making the business decisions. I'd like devs to be totally catered to and to get the exact support they want. That being said I realize that it would probably have a negative impact on business and so each platform holder needs to find a balance between keeping devs happy and doing what they consider to be the best thing for their platform.

Maybe MS does shaft devs too much. Problem is that XBLA keeps offering up so much goodness it's hard to understand why some people clamor for change so much, it's well and truly delivering already and many are making money, hence the skepticism.

Once we start throwing "anecdotal" around, then there isn't much of anything to talk about. The entire crux of this thing is people's experiences with working as MS as their publisher for the game.

I don't know how the separation goes between "Microsoft the XBLA Publisher" (where your game is rolled into MGS) vs "Microsoft the Platform Holder" (the one that does advertising, certification, etc)... It does seems a bit blurry, and the left may not know or care what the right is doing.

 

[see5harp]

I think Blow fancies himself an artsy kind of guy, and I don't think it's too unheard of for people like him to get caught up over details like some immersion-breaking notification popping up when he doesn't want it too.

And I'm sure Microsoft would be pretty pissed if he just fucking with the achievements.

I understand where he's coming from, but in the context of modern entertainment consumption it's ridiculous. If a player shares his specific viewpoint they can turn notifications off. It sorta reminds me of Muholland Drive having no chapters on DVD.

 

[mujun]

Once we start throwing "anecdotal" around, then there isn't much of anything to talk about. The entire crux of this thing is people's experiences with working as MS as their publisher for the game.

I don't know how the separation goes between "Microsoft the XBLA Publisher" (where your game is rolled into MGS) vs "Microsoft the Platform Holder" (the one that does advertising, certification, etc)... It does seems a bit blurry, and the left may not know or care what the right is doing.

Sure, but like a lot of news I don't like to jump the gun. How often do you see news outlets reporting "Nobody was stabbed today, rejoice!"?

From the outside the service seems to be working really well, delivering a lot of good stuff on a regular basis. Sure, when compared to similar services it has it's weak points (sales aren't that good, doesn't support devs as much, etc) but I'm still not convinced there's a major problem as Team Meat of Jonathon Blow would have you believe.

Would make an interesting investigation for one of the news sites to do, though, that is for sure.

 

[Majora]

Has there even been an XBLA release that doesn't sell massively better on Steam?

Even if Steam does outsell the XBLA versions of games (I honestly don't know if they do or not), they're only superficially comparable. A more pertinent comparison would be between XBLA/PSN/WiiWare sales if you want to put your game on console, and it's pretty obvious that there seems to be more desire by most devs to get their games onto XBLA, than the other two services. So they obviously must feel that the potential for better promotion and better media coverage (and it'd very hard to argue against the idea that XBLA games do tend to get more media coverage, for whatever reason), leading to better sales is probably going to be worth the hassle of the more stringent guidelines in place.

 

[StuBurns]

I do think it's honourable to not release a 360 version if you believe the compromises to the experience are too great (if that's actually the case or not). But even if Braid sold more on other platforms, it's the 360 audience that were there to support the game day one, he made a lot of money from it too. It'll be pretty lame if they don't get to play his next game.

 

[XANDER CAGE]

I remember him saying as much during the E3 bombcasts. It's one of the few times I've been able to put up with Blow to be honest, he often comes across as a bit of a blowhard (do ho ho). I remember when Braid first came out and he was complaining that not enough people bought his game, and his "stunt" where he was showing off The Witness at PAX without telling anybody "to make a point" was a severe case of whothehellareyoutalkingto.gif

Still, the Stepto vs. Blow confrontation was amazing. I'm not a Jonathan Blow fan but that earned him some respect with me, even if some of his points (you can turn off notifications, duder!) were a little contrived.

 

[Mizzou Gaming]

The only thing I don't like about BLOW is that he is one of those "my way or the highway" people, which makes him very hard to like or even respect. I'm not saying XBLA doesn't have its share of issues but overall XBLA has been a huge success.

 

[SapientWolf]

Thats sounds so... pretentious.

I think he means that he's not gonna sell out his vision for profit. Case in point: focus testers hated Braid.

Towards the end of the cycle, Microsoft started focus testing Braid - and "it was terrible", said Blow. "The scores were terrible. And then you could feel the interest in this game at Microsoft evaporating rapidly. They stopped answering my emails quite so quickly."

JB didn't really care though.