The XBLA audience (and developers) very quickly ("stampeded") abandoned the platform for phones and Steam. I see Microsoft saying: "Well then, see ya later I guess. Never really made much money off you indie guys anyways." Microsoft makes way more money off of the casual Kinect and AAA retail audience than it does off of $10 downloadable indie titles that move 25,000 units who demand valuable space on their adboa*cough*dashboard.
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Why is Sony getting so much more credit than MS for embracing the Indie scene?
- Thread starter LQX
- Start date
The XBLA audience (and developers) very quickly ("stampeded") abandoned the platform for phones and Steam. I see Microsoft saying: "Well then, see ya later I guess. Never really made much money off you indie guys anyways." Microsoft makes way more money off of the casual Kinect and AAA retail audience than it does off of $10 downloadable indie titles that move 25,000 units who demand valuable space on their adboa*cough*dashboard.
Ska Studios (Dishwasher) or Humble Hearts(Dust: An Elysian Tail) definitely fit the mold. Mommys Best Games is another one.
That's some revisionist history. Sony removed OtherOS support precisely because that's what allowed Geohot's first exploit. That eventually led to people finding the keys.
ari said:
Never said they didn't. They were the first to provide an integrated platform, and a solid network. But they're also quite notorious for having draconian restrictions. Hence people jumping out.
Zen studios, Humble Hearts, and whatever team Warm Machine works for. So there's 3 =p
though I'm just messing around since I know plenty of indie devs dislike MS
You either don't own a 360 or haven't turned it on in a long time. XBLIG aren't buried or lost in some ghetto. They are easy to find and featured on the front section of the games tab sometimes.
Really man, as someone who used to work in this industry (or still does for all I know), I'd think you wouldn't pull the same crap as some other questionable posters.
XBLIG are the ghetto though as far as how people view them on 360. And can you please stop questioning the bias of every single poster that disagrees with you? It's one thing if they're pushing a different agenda; it's another if they're factually incorrect.
The Net Yaroze launched with a support forum that saw little in the way of attention in the US. That was about it. And aside from the initial push, it wasn't promoted at all.
Over in Europe, Net Yaroze games were published on collections (granted no one got paid and they were considered demos), but it was a way for hobbyists to get seen. That simply was not an option with SCEA.
As for the PS3, yes, it got hacked. MS also had a hypervisor exploit. It happens on complex systems. That said, Sony went with the nuclear option. Rather than patching the exploit, they nuked Linux. And, in the end, said exploit was just a window into the system. What really busted things wide open was not the hypervisor attack, but the fact that the hypervisor attack let people in to see how the security keys were handled.
It was that security flaw (Sony engineers completely screwing up and not using a random number generator) which led to the PS3 and PSP keys getting dumped and the ability to sign software directly for those systems.
With Microsoft, XNA was a brilliantly open system. You pay your $100 and you have a pretty full featured dev kit on a retail system. Was it the same as a full kit? No, but it also was a lot cheaper, a lot more available and easy to ramp up on.
The major complaint from indie developers about Microsoft's XBLIG is, oddly, what they are praising about Sony's new direction - a lack of strict publishing controls.
Microsoft restricts XBLA releases because it doesn't want to flood the market. It's best to think of XBLA as the retail storefront. There, game releases are structure to ensure that you don't see a flood of games one week and a dearth the next.
Whenever there is a flood of releases at retail, most suffer as people in general do not save for entertainment. They splurge. And if someone is buying one game a month, they're buying one game a month (or one a week, etc.).
XBLIG doesn't restrict that. You're free to publish, even if 100 other people are publishing. But because there are so many people publishing on XBLIG, it's difficult to stand out. Yes, there are the top games promoted in the dashboard ads and featured in the XBLIG storefront. There is the voting, but just as we've seen many times in the past (Atari, iOS, Android, etc.) when there is no gatekeeper, it becomes very difficult for any one title to get noticed.
Sony is still somewhat fresh and new to embracing indies. So it doesn't have that flood. Perhaps it won't, as you do need an actual Vita dev kit and that will naturally limit the number of developers as compared to XBLIG where anyone with an Xbox 360 and $100 could jump in.
It will be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Don't forget free development tools on the PC side. MS hands out perfectly usable versions of Visual Studio for free.
Yes, XBLIG has its own top level storefront on the Xbox and on Xbox.com, getting equal placement with the XBLA and GoD storefronts.
Minis are also placed high on the tree on the Sony side of things.
I'm not sure how similar treatment means one is the "ghetto" and the other is "promoting indie games."
Sounds like the inverse of the PS Mobile situation (well as least as recently as six months ago).
SCEA has since turned around, but it used to be the case that if you published a game on PS Mobile, you could not get NA tokens from SCEA. SCEE would happily give you EU tokens, but NA was not happening.
That's not exactly developer friendly behaviour. Indies have enough trouble getting noticed. Not being able to get tokens for an entire region is far from "catering" to small developers.
Sony has turned a lot of things around in the past few months. If it keeps to that path, then promising times are ahead. Only time will tell if this is a true commitment though or simply a flash in the pan.
Maybe I'm not understanding how the term ghetto is being used in this context. I thought I knew what people meant. If it references the quality of the games on XBLIG, well that's no different than any other open marketplace. If it references the location of XBLIG on the marketplace, it has a featured tab just like GoD and Arcade games. So maybe that's where I'm confused since neither should be a negative directed towards XBLIG specifically right now.
Also, I never questioned anything with Clear, I pointed out how it's surprising that he would readily fall on misconceptions like the other people here. Unlike many of the other people here, he's worked in the industry and so I would think he would have a more open perspective on how or why things are done. Maybe I'm wrong, but I never meant any disrespect with that comment.
This Wired article has some good quotes on the indie situation. Pretty scathing of MS:
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/04/sony-indies/
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/04/sony-indies/
Interesting article. Thanks.
Flatline
Banned
Lol, Jon Blow in 2011 at GDC wearing the same shirt as he did at Playstation Meeting. Must be his "presentation" shirt.
Oppo
Member
Yeah that pretty much answers the OP's question.
I'd love to know how the sea change happened in the Xbox division; ever since the Kinect/Natal announcement, it's like a totally different set of people are running things over there.
Great article.
Cornbread78
Member
This pretty much says it all. Sony finally opened the door to it's corner office, pulled their suit coat off, threw it over the back of their chair, rolled up their sleeves and is finally getting to work with these guys. It really came through at their presentation and it looks like they are takig that same approach towards larger devs as well. As with many things in life, I guess you have to get smacked around one in awhile to wake up and change...