

Microsoft Slowly Euthanizes Xbox Indie Games - heresy
http://devlicio.us/blogs/vinull/archive/2010/11/03/microsoft-slowly-euthanizes-xbox-indie-games.aspx

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snprbob86
_sigh_ This is a subject that is dear to my heart: Until recently, I worked on
the team that built the XNA Framework, Tools, and Xbox Live Indie Game
ecosystem. More specifically, I primarily worked on Visual Studio integration.

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....

~~~
MagicalTimeBean
The Visual Studio integration is and always has been flawless. Debugging on an
XBOX and being able to break into code on my PC is just an unheard of
capability for technology at this price point, on a console. Thanks for all
your hard work on this.

I'm hoping the winds change again in our favor. Maybe with enough parties
vested in XNA they will know better than to drive away their seasoned
developers by starving IG.

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ytNumbers
It's easy to view Microsoft as an evil corporation that is trying to keep the
little guy down, but this story is remarkably similar to how Google has
treated the little guy on YouTube. Google and Microsoft may have more in
common than folks here would like to admit.

~~~
netaddict
What are you talking about on YouTube? Most of the top Youtube partners
(people who get paid by youtube for videos) are individuals and not
corporations.

I don't know any YouTube decision that hurt YouTube channels by individuals in
any way.

~~~
ytNumbers
The YouTube of 2010 is very different from the YouTube that Google acquired in
2006. It's nice that Google and Microsoft share revenue with the little guy.
However, the evolution of YouTube over the years at the expense of the little
guy is quite similar to Microsoft's treatment of Indie X-Box developers. You
don't have to do a lot of searching on YouTube to find videos where small time
video producers bitterly complain about how the gradual evolution of YouTube
over the years has caused the little guy to suffer the death of a thousand
cuts when it comes to YouTube's video discovery mechanism.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V025E_b5I4g>

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dinedal
Sadly, when trying to get on a console as an Indie developer, this is far
better then Sony's or Nintendo's options.

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"

~~~
city41
> this is far better then Sony's or Nintendo's options

Hell, Nintendo is practically hostile towards indie developers. But this just
goes to show, without competition MS will only treat customers/partners as
good as the bare minimum they have to, and no more.

------
stuhacking
"XBLIG can not connect to the Internet

...

XBLIG can not be played offline"

Well... damn.

~~~
ben1040
That also generated a couple parse errors in my brain until I think I figured
it out.

I'm guessing what they mean is the user must be logged into Live in order to
play the game (requiring the Xbox to be online), however the game itself
cannot access the Internet in any way.

~~~
ismarc
For the xbox indie games, you can't use sockets or any network access outside
of what they provide for the xna api on the xbox. This limits the games to
peer-to-peer with a max of 6 (maybe 4, can't remember offhand) players in a
single session.

In general, the indie dev situation is awesome on xbox, especially compared to
ps3 or the Wii. It has a great community set up for controlling quality and
content ratings without requiring intervention from Microsoft and the speed
you can go from no tools to code run on the 360 is nothing short of amazing.

~~~
jcl
_especially compared to ps3 or the Wii._

That was something that confused me about the article. "Euthanizes" implies
that Microsoft is actively trying to kill the service, but from the complaints
it sounds like they are simply failing to improve it. And if they are already
better than their competitors, it's not surprising that there is little
pressure to improve.

Given that, it seems unreasonable to assume that the situation will not be
better for Windows Phone, since Microsoft will need to stand up to comparisons
against the iPhone and Android development experiences.

~~~
kevingadd
They're actively making changes to the service that make it worse, so it goes
a little further than 'failing to improve'. The platform was already in need
of significant improvement to serve as a real revenue stream for indie
developers - only the biggest successes on XBLIG were bringing in revenue
streams large enough to justify further development as anything other than a
hobby. The changes they've made have actively made this situation worse, by
making it harder for end-users to discover/purchase games and harder for
developers to support their customers. Their current trajectory indicates that
their only concern is the success of Windows Phone 7, and based on how they
dropped support for Zune, if WP7 fails they will probably kill the Indie Games
program entirely and use the funding on something else.

~~~
ismarc
What particular changes have they made that make it worse? Looking at the
article, and from all the newsgroups/mailfeeds I'm on, the only changes are
the 4.0 breaking updates (expected with a major point change, same thing
happened going to 3) and the menu layout. Everything listed in the original
article here have been in that state for the past few years.

------
DrStrngeluv
I was working on a game in my spare time, with an eye to eventually release it
on XBLIG if I ever finished. This and a number of other niggling things, such
as this ([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2010/10/12/xna-
game...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2010/10/12/xna-game-
studio-4-0-xbox-360-and-indie-games.aspx)), have prompted me to basically drop
the project and switch over to making a Mac/PC/Linux game instead, focusing on
Mac first.

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kenjackson
This article needs more context. For example, how popular were indie games
before the change? If they were very unpopular, and users were complaining
that other aspects of the dashboard were hard to find, and they kept running
into indie games, this change may make sense.

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.

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i_c_b
There ought to be a rating somewhere about how wildly a company tends to veer,
and how often, when corporate re-strategizing kicks in, specifically in
regards to APIs and deployment. MS in particular seems to be pretty schizoid
that way, at least in the consumer space. (People were also bitching about
Facebook and its APIs in that regard recently, no?) Say what you will about
Flash, but I have unfinished games from 2006 that I could still safely release
tomorrow without issue.

------
kevingadd
One particularly troubling decision not mentioned in this post: a new version
of the XNA development tools (4.0) was recently released that introduces many
breaking changes from the previous supported version, 3.1. Some of these
changes actually reduce the number of windows machines an XNA game can run on,
and other changes remove features entirely (even though they worked before).

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...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2010/10/12/xna-game-
studio-4-0-xbox-360-and-indie-games.aspx)

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.

~~~
chadgeidel
"A smaller subset of Windows" - I assume you mean that it supports all Windows
OS's they have released in the past 5 years? (I.e. not XP).

Microsoft wants to move on from XP. I believe it's fair that they produce dev
tools that reflect that fact.

EDIT: That being said, this is still a disappointing turn of events.

~~~
kevingadd
The switch from the previous device caps model to HiDef/Reach means that games
cannot opt to run on any windows machine that supports the GPU features they
require, or choose to scale their experience down based on available features.
If you select the HiDef profile, your game will fail to start if any of the
features in the profile are missing. Likewise, the Reach profile prevents you
from using HiDef features, so you can't target any of the millions of PCs that
occupy that space in-between (for example, anyone with an Intel GPU). While it
is theoretically _possible_ to ship a PC game using the Reach profile, the
profile is so absurdly limited that you'd be insane to use it for anything
larger in scope than a 2-week project.

I don't think they dropped XP support, they just made it harder to use on XP.
It does require .NET framework 4, though.

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torme
I don't understand moves like this.

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.

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dgallagher
The late-2010 Xbox 360 dashboard update did seem to bury the indie game
section under more menu's than the old one did (this is my gut feeling; I
don't recall the steps for the late-2009 dashboard update):

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).

~~~
robobenjie
In 2009 I believe it was

1) Game Marketplace

2) Indie Games

------
TheEzEzz
Does anyone have any suggestions for the best way to contact Microsoft and
negotiate an XBox Live Arcade publishing deal?

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.

~~~
kevingadd
My understanding is that at present, Microsoft prefers for XBLA deals to be
negotiated through publishers, as most of the (fixed in quantity) XBLA
publishing slots for each year are assigned to those publishers more or less
in advance.

If you really want an XBLA deal for your XNA game, your best bet is probably
the MS-run yearly competitions. Honestly, I think you'd be better off talking
to Valve and getting on Steam, because they're a) not totally insane and b)
already selling other XNA games on their platform.

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dbotha
What possible downsides would there be to Microsoft pushing Indie games more,
perhaps through a dedicated channel on the dashboard? Is that kind of exposure
likely to cannibalize retail game sales to any extent? It just seems to me
that there is so much potential being wasted here, and for what reason? Just
look at the iOS App Store, any Indie developer can release a game and it's
thriving.

~~~
mole5000
The assumption is that Indie sales hurt XBLA sales. XBLA pay good money to get
on the platfrom/certification, XBLIG's pay peanuts to do so.

