

Why Game Developers Are Flocking to Sony and Fleeing From Microsoft - pjmlp
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/04/sony-indies

======
zalzane
It seems that Sony has picked up on one of Microsoft's big weaknesses -
they're horrible at actually delivering good products. Indie developers are
.much. more opinionated than AAA developers can afford to be, so when
Microsoft shits on indie developers (XBLIG), they aren't hesitant to just
develop for a different platform.

Compare this to Bungie (or is it 343?) who develops one of Xbox's major
exclusive titles - Halo. Microsoft can make development as hard as their
incompetence can offer for Bungie's developers, but in the long run the
developer's opinions don't matter because management calls the shots and as
long as Microsoft pays them enough to maintain Halo as an exclusive title,
they don't really care.

Hobbyist/indie developers don't get in on any of those perks, and since they
make their own decisions, they can choose to develop for whichever platform
they please. In addition, it's nice to actually read good news about Sony for
once, I hope they profit off of their investment in the indie scene.

~~~
grogenaut
Except MS probbably bends over backwards to grease the way for the golden egg
laying Halo franchise.

------
atesti
When Jonathan Blow complained about the release criteria that Microsoft wants
for any Xbox game and Xbox Live Game I was truly impressed: He wrote somewhere
that the game had to be runnable for 4 days, so even the tiniest memory leak
would really kill it. He also complained that the mandatory "Do not turn off
console while saving" was annoying, he wanted the game to just open up with
the first scene. He managed to do this by writing all save games to a temp
file and renaming them...

I'm a bit torn here: It sucks how Microsoft again and again destroys something
valuable they have created. It's interesting that the platform criteria and
testing criteria are a pain for the developers but enforced. But it's quite
impressive that at least theoretically any Xbox game is thoroughly tested!

