Skulls of the Shogun Dev: Microsoft is ‘Institutionally Incompetent’

The game developer of the Xbox Live indie title Skulls of the Shogun has given a candid interview, where he recalled an unpleasant experience in working with Microsoft.

Speaking to RockPaperShotgun, Borut Pfeifer of Plush Apocalypse Productions likened the studio's exclusivity deal with the platform holder as "making a deal with the devil," but not for the reasons one might expect.

The developer says that he and his team stumbled their way through the game's development due to issues they were having with cross-platform support between the Xbox 360 and Windows 8, and that they weren't issues easily resolved despite the financial resources Microsoft had at its disposal.

"We thought 'well, it's Microsoft, they have bankroll, they can afford this stuff,'" Pfeifer said, "but because of their processes seeming so fucked up, they couldn't actually do that. Even though they were partially funding the game to completion, we had to take a loan to cover the fact that they hadn't yet paid us what they were supposed to."

The developer described Microsoft as an "institutionally incompetent" organization that was "not really set up to be a decent publisher."

The rest of the interview can be read here.