Tim Schafer Confirms Warning that Indie Devs are Fleeing Xbox Live
While indie games are as hot as ever with success stories like Minecraft and Tim Schafer new Kickstarter Project, one would imagine platforms like Xbox Live would do everything in their power to encourage talent to develop for them. However, indie developers seem recently to be leaving Xbox Live and the XNA development environment due to Xbox Live’s newest interface change.
This was first noted in a comment by Ron Carmel, and now Industrygamers.com posted an interview with Tim Schafer mirroring the concern. Tim claims that the added costs and problems with distributing patches with closed systems like Xbox Live and the PSN networks will slowly start to outweigh the benefits of the consoles.
There are good games on both platforms. And that’s the thing, is that I really believe in both those platforms, and I want them to succeed… . So when you read an article about that, warning about the migration away from the platform, that’s a shame and we want that not to be the case.
As a Instructor, I still see students using XNA due to the familiarity with its Library, but I see future projects moving to more open licenses if the next generation of consoles aren’t as open or offer more to students and indie developers with limited production budgets.
Until developers stop trying to do crazy, non user-friendly things with their software, I’m all for the console manufacturers maintaining control. I’ve yet to see a decent indie game anyway. I’d love to see some quality work coming from small studios and not the giant publishers, but that’s just not been the case yet.
I’m always willing to give indies a chance, and I will gladly pay for a *quality* title. But them to leave because they don’t like the console interface seems like a cop out excuse for not having the talent, time, money, or other resources required to publish their games, especially those that saw their previous releases flopped. Quite often the flopping of a title is more than well-deserved.
Wow you guys are dicks.