Indie developers cannot self-publish on Xbox One | Hacker News Reader

Indie developers cannot self-publish on Xbox One

polygon.com

148 pointsjwallaceparker103 comments

It's ok, Sony seems to be willing to take them:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/04/sony-indies/

So far everything I've seen makes PS4 a clear choice over Xbox One as a console, although I'm still curious what Valve has in mind, but it doesn't look like they are in a hurry to announce anything so could be another year or two of waiting.

Funny. So far everything I've seen makes XO a clear choice for me over the PS4. To each their own. Not to say, I don't want Indie developers, but that is not really a factor I even consider when making a purchase.

Dude, a lot of games are going to start being 'indie'.

The programmers are smart - I foresee a lot of good programmers going into either middleware or kickstarter.

The next gen consoles, with their power, are going to bring dynamic animation and procedural 3D environments and numerous innovative areas so that small teams can unshackle themselves from the legions of artists necessary today.

I agree. Lower operation costs, no need to pay all those worthless sack of shit suits and manager cunts.

90% of paid salaries will be to people who contribute to sound, code, graphics and other things that is shipped.

Strong words but you also need somebody to make sure it all comes together and actually ships.

That's true but there is a middle ground, and it's not like indie developers can't get it together and ship great code without being massive. A good recent example that gets thrown around here is the new Tomb Raider, where first month sales of ~3.5 million were underwhelming because the game cost so much to make (and/or was meant to subsidize Square-Enix's other recent failures). Compare that to something like Braid or Journey, which obviously aren't games of the same scope as Tomb Raider but they're quality, highly rated games made by a fraction of the people.

I'm starting to get tired of this 'we don't need no suits' talk on HN. You need a marketing strategy, regardless of how good your game is.

Publishers have the know how and capital to devise and implement such a strategy. Don't make the mistake to assume that they are just there to take a cut of your profits without putting any value on the table.

Yeah, there's a lot of talk but not many successful examples to make up for the speech. What has actually come out of Kickstarter yet? Not much. And most of the game-related projects are super late. Mmmm.

I am not sure that developers without publisher pressure is ACTUALLY a good thing. Sometimes you need constraints to do good work.

Well, games with publisher pressure are often late as well and/or released half-finished, so that's not a shining example of a business layer making a real difference.

You don't need a marketing strategy, you need somebody who knows pr, since you can't afford to pay for ads anyway.that person shouldn't be in a suit.

Marketing is way more than just ads and PR.

"good programmers" and "good indie games" are not by any stretch of the imagination mutually inclusive. [insert made up stat where 9 out of 10 badass programmers don't have the creative umph to put out a fun game]

m3mnoch.

> The next gen consoles, with their power, are going to bring dynamic animation and procedural 3D environments and numerous innovative areas so that small teams can unshackle themselves from the legions of artists necessary today.

Ah, the dream. I've heard the same thing for the last 15 years.

Especially since the "next gen consoles" are about the same performance as today's mid-range gamer PC.

Switching to x86 architecture doesn't make it a PC in a box. These are highly tuned machines, designed specifically for developers to maximize performance. Yes, even the Xbox One.

Yeah well, the same thing was said about the Xbox360 when it came out, yet it didn't outperform the PC of that time very much even though it was "highly tuned" as well.

And AMD APUs are not very powerful beasts either, as far as I know. Not matter how tuned the whole architecture is...

They'll do the job for the next 5 years or more. In 2005 a 360 was significantly cheaper than an equivalent PC and I'm sure the same will be true this time around.

If you look at how the extra power on PC is used you'll see it's the same type of games, prettier. Almost universally. I can't think of a PC game that uses performance to do something significantly new or interesting, or even do some gameplay better.

It's going to be the same this new generation too. What can we so with this extra raw power? Not much more except make the game games, prettier. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo know this, which is why they're all pushing for second screen integration, social features, online connectivity and (especially in MS's case) motion input.

Microsoft isn't betting on missing out on the next Minecraft. They're betting on being able to bring it to the platform once it's a confirmed hit.

Compared to the consumer-facing mess that's XBLIG, it's hard to fault them.

I'm in the same (but kind of opposite) boat. I see the XO as pretty much everything I want in a multi-purpose console, however, the only games I really play on the Xbox are Minecraft and Braid, which I assume would be excluded here (welcome to be proven wrong).

Regardless, the Indie games tend to be the ones I gravitate to, for no good reason I can determine, so that's a pretty damning data point to me at least.

Both Minecraft and Braid type games will also launch on the XO since both games had a publishing deal (both under Microsoft actually).

If one big player in the last generation had welcomed indie devs, it is likely that games like Minecraft and Braid would have been exclusive to their platform. As it was, Microsoft was more open by offering publishing deals. They needed publishing deals in the current generation because there was no other option.

Really? Are you just saying that to be contrary? What specifically about the XO are you more excited about than the PS4? I'm genuinely curious.

Personally, the locking down of the platform to destroy the used game market is a big loss, imo. Being anti-friendly to indie developers is just another data point for sure; it's still not engendering excitement about the future of the XBox.

I don't watch much live TV, yet I think the TV integration is cool. The fantasy sports stuff is just one possibility, it was hinted at during the presentation, but imagine what could be done for debates or less interesting award shows.

The newer Kinect seems real neat, although I do fear what it could be used for, (emotion tracking during tv ads?)

I think it's too early to speculate on "destroying the used game market" as MS has been very vague on the exact details. Not an issue for Steam for what it's worth.

Skype integration does seem cool, after moving away from home, it's nice to Skype with the family back home, and doing it on a TV seems more personal to me than an iPad or laptop.

The instant switching feature seems cool too, will have to see how it actually performs. Right now on my tv there is 2-3 second delay while switching inputs. Quite a first world problem, but cool that they are addressing it.

To me it didn't seem like PS4 brought much new to the table, while XO seems a bit more of an evolution of the last console.

Things like instant switching seem to be minor to me compared to the locked-down nature of the XO. I would much rather have a PS4 and just use a Roku for watching video.

The snap-in app stuff loses a lot of its potential when Microsoft comes out and says that devs have to establish traditional console publishing partnerships.

e.g. Want to put your app.net snap-in out there so people can communicate that way during broadcast events? Sorry, Twitter doesn't want it. Maybe Facebook has enough money to buy its way in, but you're SOL.

Want to do an Amazon-style "X-Ray" companion app for video content? Sorry, Microsoft is rolling their own.

xmpp chat? Nope. It's Skype-or-nothing.

etc.

Honestly I don't see much difference. Roughly the same (powerless) hardware based on AMD APU crap, which means that any mid-range gaming PC will be leaving these consoles in the dust right at launch.

The fact that these consoles have PC-like hardware make the market ripe for disruption: Now any company, like Valve and their potential steambox, can come and put a cheap AMD APU based box on the market and let publishers publish the very same games that they publish on the PS4 and Xbox One. Of course this means you will not get access to exclusive games from Sony or Microsoft, but that's been proven to be a very small amount of games every year (less than 5%).

It may be a new come-back for the PC in the living room.

The exclusive titles are often the "Must haves" though, not to mention that you can sell for higher prices than you can on a PC.

What Must-haves were there on the current generation ? I was considering "Trico" as one of them for PS3 but it never came out... and will probably be cancelled or something.

Honestly, nothing much comes to mind, and most of the so-called exclusive titles like Alan Wake made it to the PC eventually.

Halo 3, GTA 4 , forza 2 and Gears of War were the titles I remember everyone being excited about around launch. Granted some of these did come out for PC eventually but there was quite a wait.

HL3 on valve box

Nintendo is also working hard to court indie developers. That crowdfunding spoof was to attract attention to their developer portal.

(well, family-friendly indies at least. Don't expect to see Hotline Miami on WiiU any time soon)

Attracting developers is one thing.

Retaining developers, inspiring them, giving them proper tooling, reducing bureaucracy, and generally enabling their success -- that's a whole other ball game.

Very good point. But considering how little attention the console got from large third party publishers, I think they at least have the incentive to make it work.

I'm currently attending NordicGame/NordicUnite and yesterday Nintento promised to reduce bureaucracy and make it easier for any developer to publish. It sounds like they are desparate and willing to reduce the bar, just to get any games.

Nice thing is that Unity3d seems to have a usable port for WiiU, so it should (in theory) be much easier to developer for Nintendo. If you use Unity, you can at least reuse everything on a different platform if Nintendo launch fails.

It's funny that Microsoft feels XBox Live Indie Games was such a mistake and seems to think that indies did so much harm to them, given that indies generally feel like Microsoft has been intentionally harming them from the start.

They basically left that system to rot without supervision, and then it did. Where's the surprise in that? It's like they decided to greenlight it only so they could sabotage it and use it as proof that they don't have any reason to work with indies. It's incredibly stupid given that some of the best indie XBox Live Arcade exclusives (or former exclusives) were all built using XNA - Bastion, Fez, Dust - but they screwed those devs as hard as they could too, despite the fact that those games were partially funded by deals with Microsoft!

Of those 3, only Fez was "screwed" by Microsoft, and that was Fish's own fault--he released a buggy game without adequate QA...and a buggier patch with even worse QA...and wouldn't (but could afford to) pay for the follow-up patch that would supposedly have fixed the bugs he didn't fix twice before.

But yeah, it is an incredibly short-sighted decision for Microsoft to eliminate the Indie program. Some of the best new games/studios rose up through that--using C#, DirectX, and other parts of the MS toolchain--but it looks like the next generation of indies will be learning the PS4/OpenGL toolchain instead.

It's absolutely insane to me that devs have to pay to get their patches allowed onto the XBox in the first place. Even Apple doesn't charge you for a bugfix patch.

You should never have to choose between wrecking yourself financially or reputationally like that.

I really hope the new XBox Bro tanks super hard because of nonsense like this.

Apparently they do this because they do their own QA/testing. It's pretty sad that they are charging users $50/year and then charging developers $10,000+ for patches. Isn't the subscription supposed to pay for the infrastructure? I can understand MS wanting to protect their baby, but the walls on the garden are so high they keep light out.

Valve wasn't having any of that pay per update deal and that's why TF2 on the 360 hasn't had anywhere near the number of updates as on PC.

MS has done a lot to hurt not just indie developers, but first party (Bungie) developers as well. Remember that ordeal with MS forcing them to release Halo 3 before it was ready and then the whole team threatened to quit?

It's sad that they've taken a digital distribution system like Xbox Live and turned it into a cash cow on both ends. They're stifling not only innovation, but regular development processes, with their blind profiteering.

Not only that, but the fact that such a buggy patch (Fez) came out which deleted save files etc, it wasn't exactly clear what value $10k patch QA was getting you.

First patch is free--only the 2nd patch and beyond cost the developer.

So they don't QA the first patch, but they'll QA the second patch? I don't follow your logic.

They QA both, but only the first patch is gratis.

What the heck? Why do you developers have to pay to submit patches?

This makes no sense to me. Devs don't pay Apple or Google to update their Android or iOS apps.

What kind of unearthly nonsense is this?

Microsoft has/had a somewhat captive audience, so they can do a lot of milking. The justification from Microsoft is two-fold:

1) Having to pay for patches gives publishers an incentive to release less-buggy games the first time. When consoles first started enabling developers to release patches, it was fashionable for gamers and reviewers to complain about patches. Many people subscribed to the idea that patching was lazy and games shouldn't have bugs at all. These days people are more likely accept patching as a good thing, so this patch cost is really more damaging than helpful.

2) Microsoft does extensive QA on your patch (just like they do initial releases) to make sure it doesn't do anything egregious, and this process costs money. Gamers don't always care who screwed up, they will blame the console-maker. So Microsoft benefits from ensuring patches don't brick your console, etc. However, it's not exactly clear how worthwhile this process is considering the buggy patches that have come out. Surely it doesn't cost them anywhere near 10 grand to pay for the testing process.

Although the top-end games are still getting more and more expensive to produce, the quality of game that the average developer is able to make on her own has risen dramatically. You no longer have to have very specialized skills to create a great game that will sell a million copies. Publishers and console-makers don't hold the power they used to. There are so many available open channels for developers to release their games to large audiences with no interference. MS is refocusing away from the gamers who rely on them less and less, to a more broad audience.

Other similar behaviors Microsoft gets/got away with: charging gamers for the ability to play online, charging a 'licensing fee' for any game released on the system (other console manufacturers do this as well), showing advertisements while navigating the console's menus.

"Apparently they do this because they do their own QA/testing."

They do supposedly do their own TRC/QA pass on all patches, but the system is highly flawed. As Exhibit A I present Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Quite an enjoyable multiplayer game, IMO, but despite already having a handful of updates in the half-a-year or so since release, the online is still terribly buggy. I've never seen an Xbox game with such poor networking and matchmaking (unlike every other 360 game I've played with friends, the party is always being split into different lobbies, lobbies get into weird states where you're supposedly able to join them but you can't until the party leader leaves and recreates them, etc, etc, total amateur hour shit).

From a QA perspective that game is an absolute mess, so either Microsoft's QA is worthless shit or they are willing to look the other way for games with high enough profile.

Submission process is not a game QA, TRC is not checking if the game is fun or if you get correct ads on your players in Madden. TRC is checking for uniform behavior (like loading UI, save game UI, correct naming of parts of the console and actions, handling pulled out controller, disk errors etc) and security issues (correct libraries, proper protocols for online etc).

Another thing - big titles break TRC routinely. Failing CoD for a TRC is like giving a speeding ticket to Obama's motorcade. That game sells 10M and brings ~100M in licensing fees every year.

What makes this situation even worse is that Microsoft was once such a high quality game publisher. Remember the days of Age2?

>>but it looks like the next generation of indies will be learning the PS4/OpenGL toolchain instead.

Thank God! I really do not want to spend any time learning Microsoft specific frameworks/APIs. I'm already familiar OpenGL and I rather spend my time working on the game itself rather then having to learn new APIs.

Yes, we should never learn new things.

You are really missing the point. Read this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

Is a technique that Microsoft loves doing.

From the article:

>> The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it's just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can't, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. <<

Yeah, right, like if everyone else wasn't doing the same.

You might enjoy Direct3D...imagine if people designed an API, documented it really well, and weren't crufty as fuck.

I've done a lot of time with OpenGL, but I won't pretend for a second that there aren't better things out there.

PS4 does not use OpenGL as it's graphics API, and doesn't even support PSGL (the higher level, OpenGL ES 1.1 like library that PS3 supported.) This is a rumor that's going to persist for the lifetime of the system.

That said most indies are moving to using Unity 3D, so as long as Unity support for PS4 is good and licensing costs aren't too high, the low level graphics API of PS4 won't matter.

Open source geeks like to spread the myth that Microsoft consoles are the only ones not supporting OpenGL.

Given that the games industry is very hostile to open source and very few geeks have access to console development kits, it is no wonder the myth persists.

If you truly understand the OpenGL programmable pipeline you understand graphics programming in general and should have to spend little time picking up a new API. Just like how you should be able to learn a new programming language with ease if you have enough experience.

From Eurogamer.net:

Low-level access and the "wrapper" graphics API

In terms of rendering, there was some interesting news.

Norden pointed out one of the principal weaknesses of DirectX 11 and OpenGL - they need to service a vast array of different hardware. The advantage of PlayStation 4 is that it's a fixed hardware platform, meaning that the specifics of the tech can be addressed directly. (It's worth pointing out at this point that the next-gen Xbox has hardware-specific extensions on top of the standard DX11 API.)

"We can significantly enhance performance by bypassing a lot of the artificial DirectX limitations and bottlenecks that are imposed so DirectX can work across a wide range of hardware," he revealed.

The development environment is designed to be flexible enough to get code up and running quickly, but offering the option for the more adventurous developers to get more out of the platform. To that end, PlayStation 4 has two rendering APIs.

"One of them is the absolute low-level API, you're talking directly to the hardware. It's used to draw the static RAM buffers and feed them directly to the GPU," Norden shared. "It's much, much lower level than you're used to with DirectX or OpenGL but it's not quite at the driver level. It's very similar if you've programmed PS3 or PS Vita, very similar to those graphics libraries."

But on top of that Sony is also providing what it terms a "wrapper API" that more closely resembles the standard PC rendering APIs.

"The key is that it doesn't sacrifice the efficiency of the low-level API. It's actually a wrapper on top of the low-level API that does a lot of the mundane tasks that you don't want to have to do over and over."

The cool thing about the wrapper API is that while its task is to simplify development, Sony actually provides the source code for it so if there's anything that developers don't get on with, they can adapt it themselves to better suit their project.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-inside-play...

>>If you truly understand the OpenGL programmable pipeline you understand graphics programming in general and should have to spend little time picking up a new API. Just like how you should be able to learn a new programming language with ease if you have enough experience.

This is very true. However, I rather not spend anytime on this if I don't have to. What you are underestimating though are the quirkiness of the new API that could waste you hours and hours. i.e. Some graphics rendering may not look quite right because some unexpected limitations, etc. etc. Finding work-arounds for all those tiny quirks can be time consuming Time that you'd rather spend on the product itself.

OpenGL?

So far I have only seen references to libGCM.

There may eventually be a GL stack, but from what I've heard, all "real" games are going to use libGCM.

Not true, Braid guy (Sorry, forgot his name) felt Microsoft tried to fuck him over intentionally.

Some people spoke openly about the shitty treatment and Microsoft fucked them over as well.

Jonathan Blow [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow

Also the Super Meat Boy devs were promised specific promotional considerations, were told that they wouldn't have a chance of success without them, put themselves through incredible agony to meet the corresponding deadline only to find that the promised promotional placement never came. A bit of this is covered in Indie Game the Movie, more on various blogs and postmortems afterwards.

Fez got hit the hardest, but the negligence applied to the XBLIG program as a whole (and XNA as a technology) actively hampered development of every serious game built with it. Developers locked into using XNA for their title were developing games for the XBox 360 without the benefit of many essential XBox 360 dev tools and features, like full on-device profiling, SIMD, etc.

In practice this meant if you had a game that ran great and worked well on PC, but had severe performance issues on the console, your only choice was to try and do very tedious printf debugging by deploying hundreds of modified executables to the console and trying them one-by-one. In comparison, native devs had access to PIX for XBox 360 which reportedly offered near-VTUNE levels of insight into CPU and GPU performance.

Constraints are fine, of course, but most of XNA's problems were not active constraints but instead negligence - promises were constantly made and then broken, whether it was promising to fix serious issues or promising to pay devs on time for game purchases.

> _They basically left that system to rot without supervision_

A few things were probably going on:

1. Microsoft is all about control and process. A lot of this is justified with "security" (so devs don't add holes to the system) or "content control" (so Little Timmy isn't allowed to see giant pink ... stuff, in games) or "we've always done it this way" (which is /safe/).

2. Promotions at MS are gated by how much you're perceived to be involved in things, not necessarily by how much value you are adding. So going to lots of meetings and being visible (e.g., adding process, or being a gatekeeper) is rewarded much more than making something go smoothly. Being invisible at review time is Not A Good Thing. Therefore: lots of accretion.

3. Reviews again: "I made that thing we did last year continue to go well" is weaker than "I did whizzy features X, Y and Z". (Hell, I've done this myself). You can't appear to be sitting on your butt.

The end result is that MS becomes difficult to work with, appears to lose focus, and cycles new, somewhat flaky technology at developers at unsustainable rates. The "new shiny" of two years ago becomes a wasteland because nobody ever got a good review based on the efforts of 18 months ago.

The odd thing about 1 is that Microsoft's empire is essentially based on the opposite premise. The foundation of their success was selling an open-for-developers OS on open hardware.

The whole design of the One seems mired in the past. No substantial changes to the developer relationship, no acknowledgement of the app market, a subscription service to go online, DRM and used game fees to protect the existing retail model, etc.

And in exchange... a cable box? Will people even have cable in five years?

It's like they set out to design the next Xbox without acknowledging that anything other than hardware has changed since 2005.

It doesn't even function as a cable box, it just adds an overlay to one being plugged in. Ridiculous. Like adding Meta features to VCR playback in 2000.

Worth mentioning, the "used game fees" thing is highly disputed right now. There are different people within Microsoft and within official channels who are saying different things.

That's the biggest fail from the announcement. Microsoft mentioned a number of things that are guaranteed to provoke gamers, like used game fees and always-on DRM, then refused to clarify any of them. Some reporters present got flat refusals to answer questions while others were given different answers depending on who they talked to.

Do you have any links to anyone clearly disputing it? Because I haven't seen any. The closest I've seen is a guy saying, effectively, "Of course we wouldn't do that! Unless it's a used game. We don't want to talk about that case yet."

From what I can tell buying a physical disk gives you an activation key that you apply to your console. Any profile on your console can play that game. If you bring the disk to another console and use your profile, you can also play the game. If you try to use the game on another console and profile, you either have to buy another copy or transfer the license from your profile to theirs.

I dug these up from Facebook:

https://twitter.com/XboxSupport3/status/336924786410278912

https://twitter.com/MrJonty/status/336924553848684544

Newer, Major Nelson has come and said that there is "no confirmation" on anything other than the ability to trade and resell games.

http://majornelson.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-and-used-games/

This means that most of XBLA type/calibre is still going to happen (90% or 100% of XBLA had publishers)

This move is more for quality control (plus data on the lackluster downloads of Xbox Indie games) rather than hatred for indies. Its still short sighted but it would also make Xbox One deal with less cruft of games, thereby avoiding the signal-to-noise being bad (remember all games are not silo'ed anymore.) making the game library browsing experience just generally more appealing to the mainstream customer. I doubt these demographic will miss Xbox indie-type games, heck I don't think they even visited that tab.

But I do like the intense focus on games by the PS4 camp more. Just happy that Xbox One and PS4 are now going in totally divergent paths.

I agree, this is more about quality control which Sony has been enforcing since PS3 as well, which funny enough was also called indie unfriendly for not having a similar system like the XBLA/XBLIG!

I'm honestly quite surprised given how important independent games have been for iOS and Android.

I was honestly expecting both players to provide app stores where developers could submit applications, whether games or not, possibly giving them an advantage over the other platform by having more apps, better development tools, etc.

Problem is the difference in the budget to bring a great game to market. It's unlikely that a tiny team can bring a great console game to market, but that happens all the time on mobile.

But I agree - it seems to make sense to make it easier to develop games (aka simpler, cheaper, better-designed tooling that does more heavy lifting), and add an appstore.

This is Oya's approach, and the big problem with this approach is that it doesn't really invite developers with deep pockets : developers who can actually pay to 1)develop a quality product, 2) advertise their product across mainstream media - which will drive demand of your platform.

And the final problem is that it'll be way less profitable for Oya: console games are so overpriced that they subsidize the consoles themselves. But apps can't really subsidize the iPhone - they're a low-margin business.

I think the real solution is to give away both the consoles and the games, but charge a monthly subscription, and divvy it up based on engagement in games. It'll be the new cable tv: $25 for basic service (you only get access to 20% of hot games, but all regular games), and $45 for premium access to everything, with netflix and hulu plus thrown in for free.

I don't know if that's strictly true, there's a number of indie titles that have done well on console and are the work of small 1-3 man teams.

Super Meat Boy, Braid and Fez are the canonical examples but there are no doubt many others.

OTOH if you let any old shit onto your store then you do get a lemon market effect which seems to have happened with mobile gaming.

Those are rare successes, but if you look at the hits on the appstore, they're much more uniformly indie.

This is a super confusing move from Microsoft.

First, don't they want indie game developers to jump to Windows phones and tablets? I'd presume Microsoft could (if not already) let developers to code once and publish everywhere that speaks Microsoft, no?

Second, Walking Dead game was crowned 2012 of the year by many publications, and my personal game of the year Journey, both are technically indie? Shouldn't that mattered?

Sigh, as usual, I'll just vote with my wallet.

Also, Walking Dead's episodic format was at risk by Microsoft's XBLA release policy, where publishers are given slots that they can have, and you don't get any more (think like airstrip use at an airport). So they had to end-run it by having each episode as DLC, rather than getting a new announcement and a stand-alone program.

Microsoft's old policies were workable but obnoxious. Instead of opening things up, they're making it worse. Nuts.

The reason we have this is that apple have proven you can get away with the walled garden. Now it's microsoft's turn to do it.

NB : they are both doing bad things.

The thing that bothers me the most about this is that Microsoft pretty much confirmed yesterday that the XBox One is running some form of the Windows Runtime.

(Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-runs-three-opera...)

So if I want to make an app work across Windows RT, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the XBox One, I have to submit three separate apps that are all coded the same way, to three different app stores.

Why couldn't Microsoft just bring the Windows 8 marketplace to XBox One and Windows Phone 8? That alone would fix the indie self-publishing problem and in turn make the XBox One more appealing.

Mouse vs. touch vs. controller is one thing. MS would probably also like to avoid buggy apps that have only been tested on one platform. WORA has never really worked, so if you want to release your app on four platforms you need to test it four times. Compared to the testing, submitting to four app stores seems like a small cost.

"so if you want to release your app on four platforms you need to test it four times."

Wouldn't submitting 4 separate apps require the same amount of attention (if not more)?

I'm actually fairly confused right now... hoping someone here can enlighten me.

"[..] Microsoft has confirmed that it will release no new versions of its XNA game development toolset, which all Xbox Live Indie Games are developed in."

The system is not backwards compatible, because it apparently is a rebuild from the very core. The old code that drove previous games will not run on the new system, and anything being written for it must be written or ported to whatever the new languages and requirements are.

If they don't publish an update to the toolkit that lets indie developers write for the system, doesn't that essentially mean there can't be any indie development for the system? It looks like they're basically saying we'll keep things just as locked down as they used to be, oh and also we won't be providing the necessary tool to even begin working on our system. (Unless they intend to release a new dev-kit and just didn't see any reason to note that?)

Rebuilt from the core isn't very specific; the architecture has switched from PowerPC to x86. There are some solutions (emulation, secondary chipset), but none that aren't difficult and expensive.

As XNA is .NET based, they would only need to port the runtime libraries to the new native APIs.

They dropped support for the only SDK they offered that produced forward-compatible games.

Unless they announce a new form of XBLIG, the only way for indies to release games for the One will be via a publisher, and even with a distribution-only deal, it means MS is effectively enforcing a tax on indies that's paid out to AAAs.

XNA is .net based, so as long as the new box has a .net runtime it should work just fine. The only downside is XNA is very old Graphics wise (dx9 based I think).

http://www.ouya.tv/

It's a dev kit itself as well and its android and yeah, they'll publish all indie stuff. :)

Several indie game makers I've talked to are really excited about this for all these reasons + the low barrier of entry ($99).

Ok, so this article from polygon links to an article on shacknews[1].

But the article on shacknews uses an interview from 2011[2] that's talking about xbox live on the 360, not on the xbox one.

We can say that if microsoft didn't say anything about this policy, it will stay - but at the same time, we don't know because nothing up-to-date was said.

Also, the article from shacklenews uses an article from gamesutra[3] to say "Xbox Live Indie Games are exempt from that policy, but that marketplace isn't necessary seen as viable."

But from the same article "[..] at least for mid and high-level performers, XBLIG is becoming a viable platform for hobbyists and single-man shops to make some cash and get their game seen"

[1] http://www.shacknews.com/article/79309/xbox-one-wont-allow-i...

[2] http://www.psnstores.com/2011/10/interview-eufloria/

[3] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26932/InDepth_Xbox_Live_I...

Sony arent just making it easy to publish, according to this (http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/03/21/unity-coming-to-sony-con...) they're actively making it easy to develop for their ecosystem, meanwhile MS are killing XNA. At least those C# game devs will have somewhere to go with their skills...

This is truly strange considering what has happened on mobile appstores that believe in a free market. They have benefitted heavily from it. Lots of new great companies like Halfbrick, Firemint and Rovio might not have happened.

At the most basic level they will lose lots of hardware sales as the app/game development that surrounds mobile appstores sells lots and lots of hardware.

Ballmer's scream should be changed to (Approved) Developers, (Approved) Developers, (Approved) Developers since Microsoft knows better what is good and what isn't than an open gaming market. The top down ivory tower controlling nature of consoles still seems to exist in the Xbone.

This is kinda strange. I know that the indie market on 360 wasn't all that great. But the way they are billing this thing as an overall living room system rather than just a game system makes me think that there could be great potential for more casual games as well as actual applications.

I'd take all the supposed garbage in the indie dev section to get the gems that appear there from time to time, like Cthulhu's Revenge or Miner Dig Deep. I spent hours playing those games and they cost me a few bucks max. I do not understand this move.

I think there's a bit of lazy thinking here in these comments. There are XBox branded indie games on Windows Phone and Windows 8.

Just because MS isn't publically saying anything doesn't justify jumping to this thread title's conclusion

Even on the PS4 indies need to be invited to publish, though, right?

It sounds like if Sony invites you then at least you get to keep the money from your game. If MS invites you then a middleman publisher takes a slice of your revenue.

If you don't have an external publisher then Microsoft or Sony must agree to be the publisher on XBLA or PSN. I think on both consoles every title gets assigned a product manager, for example.

No, any indie who wants to can apply to be a ps3/ps4/vita developer. There are some minimal requirements but I haven't heard of folks getting turned away.

On top of that Sony has also been actively courting indie developers with interesting games and doing things handing out 'loaner' devkits to make the development process less expensive.

I know several 1-5 man teams that are working on Sony titles and they are all very happy with their relationship with Sony.

My favorite Xbox game for years has been Castle Crashers which I assume is an indie game. Will indie games previously purchased on Xbox Live run on Xbox One?

No.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-not-backwards-com...

You can get it on steam though. I still don't know what I'm going to do with my saved game that has all characters unlocked :(

Well, that's stupid.

I can see that you are new around here and I just wanted to fill you in on why you are being downvoted. Comments like yours add nothing to the discussion and the level of discourse in this topic would be exactly the same if it was removed. No one is disagreeing with you, we just want some substance.

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