Microsoft Slowly Euthanizes Xbox Indie Games

Xbox Live Indie games has been an incredible, internal, uphill battle from the start. No one on any of the teams really wanted any of those restrictions, but a lot of factors were conspiring against us.

1) Legal: Indie games went into development long before Apple released the iPhone App Store. There was sooo much fear about allowing arbitrary content out there. There are also privacy concerns (think about people selling Facebook user IDs and stuff; similar things apply to Gamertags) preventing open internet access; specially considering young kids may play Xbox. Startups can "get away with stuff". Hell, Google and Apple can get away with this stuff. Microsoft can't, or simply won't.

2) Security: Full Xbox 360 titles run with full control over the box. Registered developers are trusted fully. This is in part due to simplicity, but also because games are really demanding software that want to avoid kernel call boundaries and other low level performance sucking security measures.

3) Cannibalization: Xbox Live Arcade (professional downloadable games) is big business. Leadership was terrified that people were going to systematically clone all of the best selling games. Hence silly rules like no free games and segregated Top Games listings.

4) Internal support: The XNA team is full of amazingly talented engineers. And amazingly savvy project managers. There are sooo many dependencies that go into XNA, it is simply incredible. Between the various platforms, SDKs, APIs, web services, etc. It could take two full days to just install all the stuff you need to be able to use a dev machine effectively. Such is the pain of working on a product that cross cuts about a dozen different layers of the technology stack; each layer independently written by a team larger than the entire XNA team itself. With so many partner teams, it is a miracle that Indie Games shipped at all.

5) Politics: At Microsoft, success is poisonous. If your team is talented and effective, if your product is sexy and fun -- and XNA was certainly all of these things -- then every middle manager in the entire damn company wants a piece of your action. We got re-org-ed so many times, I lost count. When XNA 1 launched on Xbox, it was a triumph. Then we spent a ton of time onboarding the latest platform, like Zune or Windows Phone, that management forced down our throats.

There is more, but this post is getting out of hand....

I'm almost thinking a new business venture would be to be a middle man between best of breed indie games and platforms with high barrier's to entry, but I guess this is called a "publisher"

...

XBLIG can not be played offline"

Well... damn.

Also, since MS doesn't review Indie games the way they do tier-1 games, lack of internet access makes sense. They're really trying to keep the XBox a safe console.

If you want some of the other features listed, consider coughing up the dough to be a tier-1 developer. Or do PC games.

As a result, many games cannot realistically be ported to 4.0 unless the developer only cares about shipping on XBox 360 at any cost. Under most circumstances, this would be fine, but Microsoft has decided that any games developed using the previous version of the framework (3.1) cannot be released if they wait more than 90 days after the official launch of the new version. Oddly enough, games previously submitted using version 3.1 will continue to function, so they're not dropping support for the framework - they just want everyone to move to 4.0. Essentially, Microsoft is forcing a release date on the set of developers who actually tried to develop games simultaneously for PC and XBox, even though this kind of simultaneous development was originally one of the things that made XNA interesting.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2010/10/12/xna-game...

Microsoft has also dropped support an entire platform: Version 3.1 of the framework allowed you to target games at Windows (DirectX 9), XBox 360, and the Zune. Version 4.0 allows you to target games at a smaller subset of Windows, XBox 360, and Windows Phone. Anyone developing a Zune game is entirely left out in the cold (that's what you get for being an early adopter) as well.

Why do companies seem to put developers in such poor positions? In platforms like this, it seems that your customers are in a large part, the developers. But instead of trying to lure them in, it's viewed more as a privilege to get on their platform than an attempt to gather the best software. I understand the desire to get on a large platform like Xbox, but isn't it at least somewhat of a concern that if Sony releases a developers eden for the platform that they'll lose business?

I suppose the problem is a lack of competition on any of the platforms, to my knowledge. If you're a developer you would want a game available on as many platforms as possible, regardless of any rules imposed on you. If you want your game on Xbox the only way to get it on is through microsoft, correct?

If not, it seems that someone should make a developer-centric distribution platform.

1) Game Marketplace (1 of 9 options)

2) Explore Game Content icon (1st listed out of 11 icons)

3) Specialty Shops (1 of 6 options)

4) Indie Games icon (2nd listed out of 6 icons)

Though to be fair the entire Xbox 360 dashboard is overtly populated with lots of menu's everywhere. A lot of it is redundant (I count at least 10 options for Kinect stuff littered throughout; there are likely more).

I've been developing an XNA game full time for the last 2 years and am unsatisfied with the state of XBox Indie Games. I have little business experience though, and have no idea how best to approach Microsoft. If money is a problem, I'm fairly confident I could raise 50k-100k on the merit of the current build.