BrokenSymmetry
Member
XBLIG is still only available in far too few countries.
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XBLIG policy changes (increased size cap to 500 MB, $1 games, 20 games per dev)
- Thread starter Wario64
- Start date
Warm Machine
Member
Because those countries require games to be rated by a rating board/system instead of by a developer community.
They probably couldn't be worth any points.
AcceptableGhost
Member
Having presence on people's lists is more than enough. I think 0G achievements for indie games would be a considerable improvement.
FloppyDelux
Member
Azure Dream
Member
XBLIG has a different set of requirements from XBLA. XBLA limits are like 2GB now, if that's even a hard limit.
SapientWolf
Trucker Sexologist
Is there another SDK or is that experiment over?
snoopeasystreet
Member
Metro apps must be html based as far as I know. XNA can still be use for non metro games but you wont be able to sell them through the app store (or something like that).
There are something like 4 or 5 times the amount of XBLIG released than the total amount of XBLA games ever released (XBLIG must be something like 2,300 or 2,400 by now??).
To give short history for those who don't know, originally many devs thought they would be able to treat XBLIG like an extension of XBLA. Unfortunately the dynamics of an open market don't really work very well like that. Some awesome XBLIG games were released, some of them even winners of the Dream.Build.Play contest, but their success has been limited, especially because they were released at high price points (400 even, like Clover: A Curious Tale was).
I think now after gaming on my son's iPad for a year I finally understand the situation a lot better. If you venture into the New Releases part of App Store for games, the situation suddenly looks a LOT more like XBLIG. No one ever looks at that part, they hear about games from friends, use search, or New & Noteworthy section.
There are seriously some very crappy games on both XBLIG and mobile marketplaces, the problem is there's no way to stop it if it's an open marketplace, and hobbyists do need a way to learn how to program and practice releasing things so I don't even think it's a bad thing.
Until PS Suite comes out (and who knows if it will actually be on PS3 or just Vita), XBLIG is the only marketplace for console indie games, there's nothing comparable. The closest comparison really is iOS App Store for games. These policy changes get XBLIG more in line with mobile games, it's easier to release cheap games (which is what people want on the open marketplaces that drive prices down) and on the other hand it's open to create something with HD art and lots of music if the dev is willing to take a risk and try to compete with XBLA/retail games at a higher price point.
I think the one last piece that would enable many of the devs to be much more successful with XBLIG would be to allow them to do sales, like put their game on sale to 80 points or even "Free" for 24 hours. That would generate more word of mouth and help out for the games that rely upon P2P leaderboards and matchmaking. Another angle of that would be if Microsoft decided to give them away during Deal of the Week for XBL Gold members (just like Sony gives away PS Minis during the PSN+ updates).
It's unfortunate that the open marketplaces encourage F2P/in-app purchase microtransaction models but it's the truth, that's one thing that probably will never be added to XBLIG and IMO that's something we should be thankful about, who knows if it will become dominant way of paying for gaming sooner or later
To give short history for those who don't know, originally many devs thought they would be able to treat XBLIG like an extension of XBLA. Unfortunately the dynamics of an open market don't really work very well like that. Some awesome XBLIG games were released, some of them even winners of the Dream.Build.Play contest, but their success has been limited, especially because they were released at high price points (400 even, like Clover: A Curious Tale was).
I think now after gaming on my son's iPad for a year I finally understand the situation a lot better. If you venture into the New Releases part of App Store for games, the situation suddenly looks a LOT more like XBLIG. No one ever looks at that part, they hear about games from friends, use search, or New & Noteworthy section.
There are seriously some very crappy games on both XBLIG and mobile marketplaces, the problem is there's no way to stop it if it's an open marketplace, and hobbyists do need a way to learn how to program and practice releasing things so I don't even think it's a bad thing.
Until PS Suite comes out (and who knows if it will actually be on PS3 or just Vita), XBLIG is the only marketplace for console indie games, there's nothing comparable. The closest comparison really is iOS App Store for games. These policy changes get XBLIG more in line with mobile games, it's easier to release cheap games (which is what people want on the open marketplaces that drive prices down) and on the other hand it's open to create something with HD art and lots of music if the dev is willing to take a risk and try to compete with XBLA/retail games at a higher price point.
I think the one last piece that would enable many of the devs to be much more successful with XBLIG would be to allow them to do sales, like put their game on sale to 80 points or even "Free" for 24 hours. That would generate more word of mouth and help out for the games that rely upon P2P leaderboards and matchmaking. Another angle of that would be if Microsoft decided to give them away during Deal of the Week for XBL Gold members (just like Sony gives away PS Minis during the PSN+ updates).
It's unfortunate that the open marketplaces encourage F2P/in-app purchase microtransaction models but it's the truth, that's one thing that probably will never be added to XBLIG and IMO that's something we should be thankful about, who knows if it will become dominant way of paying for gaming sooner or later
OccamsBlender
Member
Good to see Apple making MS run for their money and be competitive. The ease and freedom of App Store publishing is stealing indies left right and center.
But they have access to mobile app stores just fine. MS needs to be bolder now there are other examples and treat XBLIG as such and release it worldwide.
That's not exactly true, there are more than a dozen of official, Xbox Live supported countries which have no rating system in place, yet they don't have an XBLIG area - for example, Hungary and nearly all of the recently joined countries.
What is the reason then? I've always wondered why it's not available in every country that has Xbox Live, cos it doesn't make sense to not take advantage of a revenue stream when the infrastructure is already in place to sell the products, even if that revenue stream is relatively small. It would be great for the developers. I always thought it was to do with ratings too, but that doesn't make sense based on what you've just said.
How come there's always people griping about XBLA prices, but there's rarely people griping about PSN prices, when they're basically the same? In the UK, PSN prices are regularly worse in fact. The Zombie game that's out on PSN here this week is £7.99, but it was released on Live last week for £6.80. The US PSN just got TNT Racers, which was also £6.80 on Live, but £7.99 on PSN.
Triple Da G.O.D!
Member
This.
Introduce a reason why people should take a look at indie games and watch them come. Why this was never the case is very odd. But the sooner they do the better it'll be for the service.
Dark Octave
Banned
I remember when XBLA was for indies. We see how that turned out.Dear Sega.:
+
PLEASE??
Lets keep XBLIG true to what and who it was made for.
Zomba13
Member
Of course. Did you see all the marketing MS did for Game Type on the dashboard?
Nobody knows, not even my local Microsoft rep. I have tried to write an article about it but it turned out that every decision is made by the European headquarters. The Hungarian dashboard is as barebone as it could get: there are like 3 tabs, settings, game and search. No music (Zune, last.fm), no videos (Last.fm, television stations) and just a few apps and most of the time totally different (or none) items goes on sale - there were a lot of months without any daily / weekly deals and things like that.
But I have a better story: on PS3, you can register a Hungarian PSN account but you can only use it for making game saves - you can't even register it online because there is no official PSN Store here. So the Hungarian Sony division puts nice stickers on everything, telling it's customers that if they want to download content, play multiplayer, they must use an English account.
Do you really think achievements would make that much of a difference? I like them, but they're just a bonus. Adding achievements to an indie game wouldn't make me buy it, if I wasn't already willing to buy it anyway, even without achievements.
These games already have a limited appeal when going against disc-based games and XBLA games. There's tons to wade through as there's well over 2,000 games on there now with 10+ getting added every week. The majority of the games are terrible. I think those things combined is the problem. Marketing is obviously a problem too, but how much interest is there in the very well laid monthly XBLIG threads on here? Fuck all really, based on the number of replies.
So? Games have their own visual styling anyway. They almost never use native windows widgets. I don't see how they'd benefit from metro styling.
It's nice that they are improving things, but it won't help a single bit.
Why is there a 500mb size limit in the first place? If XBLA games can be up to 2GB, surely these can too. It seems like an artificial restriction so XBLA games will always seem superior.
Why should Microsoft decide the pricing of a developers game? If someone wants to release his 200mb game for a dollar, let him. Better yet they need to have the ability to release free games, that alone would greatly boost sales of XBLIG titles overall cause more people would be checking out the section constantly.
And why is there a limit to the number of games you can publish, especially if developers can seemingly easily circumvent it?
They need to do away with these limits and price restrictions if they want to compete with the App Store and actually have Indies care about this service.
Why is there a 500mb size limit in the first place? If XBLA games can be up to 2GB, surely these can too. It seems like an artificial restriction so XBLA games will always seem superior.
Why should Microsoft decide the pricing of a developers game? If someone wants to release his 200mb game for a dollar, let him. Better yet they need to have the ability to release free games, that alone would greatly boost sales of XBLIG titles overall cause more people would be checking out the section constantly.
And why is there a limit to the number of games you can publish, especially if developers can seemingly easily circumvent it?
They need to do away with these limits and price restrictions if they want to compete with the App Store and actually have Indies care about this service.
dragonelite
Member
The fact that you can use c++ with xbla and not with XBLIG is already a reason xblig performance will never reach that of xbla.
Warm Machine
Member
The pricing structure is there to cover bandwidth costs. The bigger the game the more data they have to send out. So I get why they have to control it.
As far as C++ vs C# there isn't much of a performance diff if you know what you are doing. The Prismatic Solid dev has proven you can push ungodly ploys at 60fps with c# and smart coding. My game is constantly referred to as looking as nice as an XBLA game.
Some countries with MS may have a tax issue, exchange issue or other legal issue. That or they are far too small a market to set up an infrastructure for. If MS could take your money they probably would.
As far as C++ vs C# there isn't much of a performance diff if you know what you are doing. The Prismatic Solid dev has proven you can push ungodly ploys at 60fps with c# and smart coding. My game is constantly referred to as looking as nice as an XBLA game.
Some countries with MS may have a tax issue, exchange issue or other legal issue. That or they are far too small a market to set up an infrastructure for. If MS could take your money they probably would.
Some of the games have done extremely well, the two of the Minecraft clone games broke 500K sales and one broke 100K. Many of the games you currently see in Top Downloads list are above 10K sales. There are some XBLA games that have sold less than that (the price is different but in terms of revenue some XBLIG games are still beating them).
There's some supply and demand going on, you can't get games like Trailer Park King on any other service, Let's Get Fiscal is pretty racy too. Some Trials clones have done very well (Motojump and Toy Stunt Bike). Flight Adventure 2 seems to be selling well. The Train Frontier Express game is still selling decently. And of course Minecraft doesn't exist on consoles (yet). For browsing the new releases list, yes you will have to wade through crap. But I challenge you to do the same for App Store on an iPhone, I bet you will be stabbing your eyes out just the same (although often they have little cute icons making it look like it is not crap, but it's mostly just repetitive copies of the same 5 or 6 types of gameplay).
I think those pretty much cover my opinion on the matter. I do not care one bit whether the platform is competing with the app store, or allowing anyone to run a commercial studio. That's not the point.
I love that it exists. The system gives new developers the chance to go through the entire process of bringing a game to market, including passing some (low) 3rd-party review hurdles.
A lot of suggestions really seem to be aimed at attracting consumers, and I can't help but feel that misses the point. Sure, if you can attract more consumers without losing anything, that's fine, but things like dramatically raising the quality requirements for the service would run counter to its purpose. This is a playground for amateurs. Professionals have XBLA.
Dark Octave
Banned
Warm Machine, if you're planning to do anymore titles for XBLIG I can't wait to see what you can pull off with 500mb.
I don't buy that at all, bandwidth is dirt cheap especially for Microsoft. They allow to you to download HD game trailers/videos and demos and trials and tons of other large files for free.
And most importantly Apple doesn't do this with the App Store.
Oh yeah, there are some breakout hits for sure, but a lot of the games sell like crap.
I spoke to the dev of BloodyCheckers last week and I asked him if he'd seen a boost in sales because his game got mentioned in a couple of "top 10 underrated games" lists and he said he was seeing sales of between 20 and 50 a day. The game is only 80 MSP.
As for apps on a phone, I agree - the crap to good stuff ratio is very similar and there are loads of clones of popular games. I have an Android phone and the app market is a lot like the XBLIG service. Unrestricted, filled with junk, and you get a time limited trial of every paid app. The difference is, there are tons of sites out there reviewing apps and making "top 50 apps" lists. There's much less of a presence on the web for XBLIG.
Do you get a free trial of all paid apps on the App Store, like you do with XBLIG?Sean said:
bigtroyjon
Member
I don't understand why you are so obsessed with Apple and the app store. You really think Microsoft is using XBLIG as an attempt to compete with the app store?
Warm Machine
Member
I'm not saying it is right for them to operate that way but it is the obvious intention.
In December I think everything was down in terms of xblig revenue. Skyrim and MW3 dominated people's gaming dollars and time on the console.
Our sales haven't been great but I can attribute it to the launch month which was a mistake. Beyond that I can see our trials vs purchase and there are two things you can read into the data. First is that your trial wasn't any fun and therfor no sale. Second, the trial was fun but didn't justify the purchase price of the game.
We just updated the game and made substantial changes to the trial experience so I'm taking a no panic measured approach to the games' performance.
I personally don't buy into the whole $1 console game thing. Sure iPhone games are $1 and that is great where there is a single storefront to buy everything on as well as millions of handsets with direct access to that storefront. There is a level playing field more or less.
However, on the PC front, the same iPhone game, like Anomoly, is sitting at $4-$5 on Gamers Gate. Even Milkstone Studios just released their library there and are charging $4 a game.
Xblig is no app store and it isn't steam. It is sort of between the two and success or failure doesn't seem all that determined by price. Beat Hazard for example has done really well at $5 Same with Barkers Crest's Avatar Golf. More than anything I think it is a matter of the right game for the service at a reasonable price, with good launch timing.
Bing search for indie games is a bad joke. some serious hand-tuning is desperately needed to give it any hope of being useful.
Increasing the game limit to 20 just means the indie crap game factories will make more crap, further cluttering the service. The things the service REALLY needs have been ignored for years now and these changes really won't help much.
Bing search is mostly for movies and music...indie games appearing at all there is kind of a miracle in my opinion.
They really need to have finer categories to browse through (Match 3, FPS, Zombies, whatever) to filter the game list with...if I imagine I were a parent looking for education app there it would be very difficult to find them. Agreed there are lots of possible improvements here but at the end of the day there is some sort of viral marketing effect that happens once you cross a certain threshold and people start talking about the games more and more. I thought at one time that achievements would be necessary for people to take them seriously, but since seeing FortressCraft sell 500K I no longer think it's the case.
You are whats wrong with the world.
It's not my fault. Microsoft set this standard on their console, so by singling these titles out must mean that they're not real games.
If Microsoft doesn't take them seriously, why should I?
The problem is I am sure Microsoft doesn't want people making indie games that give you quick achievemets. I am sure if they even had a 50/100GS limit people would abuse it by making "Press A for 100GS" games.
Microsoft won't put these things through real cert because they're not worth it.
bigtroyjon
Member
I think you might want to spend some more time on your material, this bit falls flat.
That's what I mean. Bing is useless for the indie games as-is. Results are all over the place and it sucks far worse than simply having a FILTER for god's sale. A simple filter would go a long way toward making it better to use, and maybe a "top selling this week" category would give some visibility to games that are starting to catch on. *Anything* would be better than what's been done.
Also, do not allow voting on a game unless the person BOUGHT it. That would cut down the huge amount of vote spamming.
Achievements can be done, just make them 0 point ones.
Kinect access for indie developers would also be a welcome addition.
No, trials are not a requirement on the App Store, but a lot of developers release "Lite" or "Free" demo versions which are sometimes hundreds of megabytes in size (Gameloft titles for example). Rage HD sells for just 99 cents (aka 80 MSP) and is 782mb.
Clearly their competitors are not having this bandwidth problem that forces higher prices. Microsoft would still be profitable on an 80MSP/$0.99c indie game, but by making indie developers sell their titles for $3.00 or $5.00, MS get a larger cut. That's the only reason for it.
The two services are directly comparable. Indie developers can pay $99 to release a game on iOS App Store with far less restrictions (set your own price, release date, have leaderboards and achievements via Game Center, have a lot more people purchasing/playing the game you worked hard on, etc) or they can pay the same price to release it on XBLIG without all those benefits. One service has taken off in a huge way and the other is running on fumes.
Microsoft introduced a great thing but they are holding it back with all these artificial restrictions and their general lack of interest.
Ugh.
You're seriously not going to buy a title because of some meaningless Achievement feature?
I don't understand why XBLIG is singled out among all open platforms for having crap, since all open platforms (iOS, Facebook) are filled with crap.
Nonetheless I'm ready to move on from XBLIG as my marketing and sales data says it's too late to change gamers' perceptions of the platform.
I'm not sure I understand your argument here.
MS get a percentage of the purchase price. I think it's a 70/30 split in favour of the devs, although I could be wrong. If MS are forcing devs to charge higher prices because they make more money that way, then so do the devs.
They've put some XNA features into the new DirectX11.1 SDK:
MS is expected to roll out the Windows 8 Phones and Tablets in June and they're going to deploy the Windows Store at the same time. They seem to be dropping both Silverlight and XNA in favor of HTML5 and DirectX11.1 . They're telling XNA developers that they can still roll out their apps, see the last post by an XNA framework dev: http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/91616.aspx?PageIndex=22
The problem that MS is not adressing however is that they won't allow non-Metro Apps on the Windows Store. So even if you can make a Windows 8 Desktop App using XNA there is no method to deploy or sell it that comes close to what the Windows Store offers. Windows Store is just like the App Store or Android Market so XBLIG and XNA are totally useless when it hits.
DaveVoyles
Member
[Nintex];33995749 said:
Actually, they've been hiring several positions for XNA lately....
[Nintex];34012191 said:
I'm not sure what their strategy is for this exactly. Why create a toolset for developers (XNA) but then not allow it to be used in your new store? Where exactly would they like people to use it? And why not have it supported in the widows store?
Mr. B Natural
Member
Too late. The mess is broken and, with the new dashboard, so well hidden it doesn't matter.