Once upon a time, it was impossible to keep track of all the incredible indie offerings that populated Xbox Live. Every single week saw several, high profile releases, with countless more in sight.
But that was then and this is now. Last week's Battle Block Theater was the first notable XBLA release in a very long time. Meanwhile, the PlayStation Network has become the place to be.
The one game that most people may think of on that end is Journey, mostly because it has won so many awards. Though in general, most indies have jumped from Microsoft's ship, onto Sony's, both eagerly and happily. What the heck happened?
A recent piece of by Wired has insight. Long story short: Sony are totally chill bros, whereas Microsoft are a bunch of jerks. Take Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid (which made its debut on the Xbox 360) and The Witness (which will debut on the PlayStation 4):
“Microsoft treats independent developers very badly… [They] put you through as much pain as you will endure in order to extract whatever [they] feel like this week."
Brian Provinciano, creator of the recently released Retro City Rampage, is also not a fan. Apparently, after he spoke out against inefficiencies on Microsoft's end, the publisher retaliated by canceling the XBLA version of the game. As a result, Provinciano was forced to resubmit Retro City Rampage and endure an approval process that was described as arduous.
Even better was how the game was released at $10 instead of $15, due to a total screw up on Microsoft's end, which cost Provinciano a pretty penny. Meanwhile, dealing with Sony has had zero headaches involved:
“Sony’s been incredibly supportive and promoted the game very well… It’s received a generous amount of promotion at no cost to me, from [advertisements] on the PS Store to events such as E3 and even having it playable on kiosks at every Walmart, Best Buy, GameStop, Target and Future Shop across North America… Never in my wildest dreams would I have expected this to happen."
As for Sony themselves, they seem quite aware of how much the competition is dropping the ball. According to Nick Suttner, a Sony account supervisor who works with indies:
“We do our best to empower developers across all of our platforms, to release their games when and how they want, and we’ve been working hard to take as many obstacles out of the path to release as possible… “We allow developers to self-publish on our platforms; no slotting, no voting, or any of that rigmarole.”
Hearing Microsoft's poor handling of indie developers is just another thing to be worried about as it pertains to the Xbox 720. Indie game makers are an important strategy to long-terms viability and success of a gaming platform, and it's ridiculous that the publisher is ignorant of this fact. But even sillier is how, at one point, they were the place to be for all indies who wanted to make a console game. But not any more.
