Publishers Pressuring MS To Push Indies From Xbox Live? 100
R. Dobbs writes "Microsoft has reportedly drastically reduced the amount of indie titles it's going to allow on its Live Arcade service — but no such limits have been placed on material from major publishers. Have the publishers themselves been pushing this agenda? And what will it mean for indies? Quoting: 'More and more indie developers are being created, bucking the trend of working for the blockbuster-sized titles of many publishers and opting to control their own development and keep their IPs. This is likely becoming more and more of a concern to major publishers, who seem — especially in ZeniMax's recent purchase of id Software and EA's combination of Bioware and Mythic, as well as Warner Bros. purchase of Midway's IPs and studios — to be doing everything they can to consolidate their power and lock down all the available resources.' When questioned, Microsoft released a statement saying that they're 'a great supporter of independent game development.'"
Re:It's a CONSPIRACY! Or... not. (Score:3, Informative)
Large businesses simply don't want to expend the resources and time to make things available for the "little guys", because the net return is so much lower.
Actually, as much of a PITA as Microsoft is, they've actually made the XNA toolkit available for free to indie developers who want to publish XBox Live games. It's comparatively easy to use, based on C#, and lets you produce a game for the PC and XBox Live at the same time. All you really have to do is set up the controls for both systems.
Re:It's a CONSPIRACY! Or... not. (Score:3, Informative)
In the absence of a shred of evidence, what makes the original article assume there is either a Cost factor or a Conspiracy involved?
With people not having a lot of money to spend on games these days perhaps the indies had to go get jobs.
Maybe Microsoft is trying to keep the platform from going the way of the Apple App store, with 200 flashlight Apps and 50 Fart Apps.
Quality control is a good thing.
Reading the article gives me a sense of a certain amount of beer-crying going on.
Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)
Still, just the piece of kit an indie developer needs: Cheap development environment, easy distributing to a system with a huge install base.
Re:It's a CONSPIRACY! Or... not. (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, as much of a PITA as Microsoft is, they've actually made the XNA toolkit available for free to indie developers who want to publish XBox Live games. It's comparatively easy to use, based on C#, and lets you produce a game for the PC and XBox Live at the same time. All you really have to do is set up the controls for both systems.
Actually, they let you produce a game for PC, Xbox Live and Zune Devices. There is no major distribution for the Zune yet but the codebase is there. I would hope that they add this in when they merge the Zune Marketplace and Xbox Market place when the Zune HD comes out.
Only time will tell.
Re:Independents have lost (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is if I mod him funny and then he gets modded down and that process repeats it costs him a bunch of karma because funny doesn't give him anything, but off topic counts -1.
The ESA (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like game developers have finally grown big enough to start considering building their own RIAA/MPAA.
They've had one for fifteen years [wikipedia.org].
Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)
How did you get a Wii dev kit? Or are you just writing a web-based game and saying it runs "on Wii" because it has a browser?
The beauty of the Xbox is that any off-the-shelf PC can be used as a dev kit. (The *actual* dev kits have more features, of course, but the PC can do 90% of the work no problem.)