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.'"
Well (Score:2, Interesting)
Then independend developers will produce for the PC, Wii and PS3.... :-)
Re:It's a CONSPIRACY! Or... not. (Score:1, Interesting)
This is all about control of their market share.
This is no different than the strong arm tactics of the recording, video, comics, and book publication industries.
It is all about the control of information, the protection of their market share, and the funneling of new and innovated ideas and concepts through these corporations, hence losing your IP rights to them in order to do business with them.
This is a disturbing trend began with the signing of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act back in 1998. This situation will only get worse.
Re:Most Indie Titles Suck (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a developer who has had a game published on Xbox Live Community Games.
Although this isn't so much of a problem for XBLA, I think it is completely true that there are far too many low-quality titles flooding Xbox Live Community Games. The modicum of good games are being swamped by a flood of ill-designed, terribly-executed, low-quality games (and in many cases, "games"). The review process for publishing Xbox Live Community Games is designed to weed out technical issues; it's actually forbidden for a reviewer to reject a game submission because "he didn't like it". The reason for this is because the review process is done by fellow developers, and allowing subjective judgements in the review process introduces a conflict of interest.
As developers, we've time and time again asked Microsoft to introduce a user rating system, where the users of the service (and ultimately, our customers) will be able to give games ratings and allow for user recommendations. This should give power back to the users to weed out the bad games and allow the real gems of the service to shine.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft decided to actually listen to us. About a month and a half ago they announced [xna.com] that user ratings are coming to Xbox Live. From what I've heard, these features should be arriving in the coming months - so maybe once that happens things will get a little better.