| oniyide said: this makes sense, and its good to hear from an actual 360 user, I dont have one myself and ill be honest, I didnt even know there was a seperate section for indie games on LIVE, I thought it was thrown in with the Arcade games. So it sounds similar to PSN minis and if it is, its never going to blow up people. not with Limbos, Castle Crashers, etc. out there. |
Yea the section is very easy to find. Like I said on Xbox.com it's even right next to Demos, Xbla, GoD. With as big a list. On the xbox itself it is still easy to find it just isn't mixed in with professional games, which I think well really it shouldn't be.
I decided to look up Shuggy since that is mentioned in the article even though it was an XBLA game. So it was a finalist in the Dream play build contest in 2007. This was August 2007 and the game was nigh on finished it seems. He didn't get a contract from this but got a contract with Sierra Online later that year. So sometime between September-December 2007. The contract was lost when Sierra was absorbed into Activision, this was July 2008. So basically in 11 months he couldn't finish developing an indie game. Had he simply finished it within that time (which I think most would agree is a VERY long time) it would have been published.
He didn't find another publisher until October 2009, quite a while however this is kind of self inflicted since he lost his last publisher through not pushing the game out quick enough. So the new publisher he went with? Valcon games...... ever heard of them? No didn't think so. Despite this being October 2009 the game wasn't finished and submitted for certification until........ early 2011. Finally getting published in June 2011. So nearly 4 years after it had received publicity in the competition.
It seems to me the lesson to learn there was that an indie developer took too long on his game and needed some business skills. Why didn't he get it out in early 2008?
I also decided to look up growing pains. It's 240 MS points (quite expensive for XBLIG). It's a VERY simple 2d platformer, with pretty poor graphics and awful art. It has 9 levels which the developer describes as MASSIVE yet the video walkthrough for one level takes 3minutes 32 seconds. You can see yourself here http://www.smudgedcat.com/growingpains.html Although the developer themself has decided not to bother uploading the videos in HD. I mean are we meant to be surprised this didn't sell? The type of thing where there are similar games for free on newgrounds etc? Is this game meant to be next to the new Alan wake?
The simple fact is most games on XBLIG are things you would find on Newgrounds etc. When you get developers releasing higher quality things such as with Cthulu they do get more attention. Even with Zeboyd games they have 2 games on XBLIG, one released in April 2010 and one in December 2010. In October of 2011 they made $5,000 in revenue from XBLIG. In December they made $1,500 for the month. For an indie game that seems pretty great. Surely they made enough a long time ago to start doing XBLA releases etc.
