Have you not played a indie game for the last 5 years? The time where every indie game was a 2D sidescroller is gone.
Plenty of indies out there that boast better and prettier graphics than retail titles, or creative new ideas that not necessarily push the limits on graphical quality, but on scope, scale or mechanics.
Where I said that all indies are now 2D sidescrollers? My point is that you'd have to be delusional if you expect indie games to have the manpower to create so many assets that can't possibly fit very well in 3GB of ram. Specially with features like tiled resources available right there on the api for them to use.
Again, look at the competition and tell me which approach is better.
Also, I'm mostly talking about that 3GB limit which is, yes and here it comes, ridiculous. Nor did I or CBOAT mention anything about what you said (which is something great, no complaints)
The competition requires/allows you to:
- Acquire or ask for a free devkit.
- You are limited to where the devkits are available... For instance, I live in Brazil... Can I ask for a free devkit to develop my game?
- Can only debug code on said devkit, which can be an issue for more than one person trying to test the game.
- Since it's using the devkit it allows you to use everything the hardware has to offer, which is cool.
Am I'm missing something? I can see some advantages (and disadvantages too) in that model, but not that makes self publishing on the store ridiculous.
3GB is understandable once you know how the system works. Xbone has a VM that runs under the windows kernel, and can run WinRT too. WinRT is the platform from which Ms can make apps cross compatible between devices, and how it allows developers to use native languages but still being somewhat sandboxed.