| d21lewis said: -Not supporting smaller games. May not be a financial mistake but it hurts their image when you can only count on them for blockbusters. There is a market for games that don't go on to sell 4 million copies, you know. -Not testing their hardware enough before launch. Had the 360 not exploding when you tried to.....use it...Sony would never have stood a chance. -I only know about video games. I have to say that, compared to the competition, Microsoft has done a surprising amount of things right. |
Actually, that's exactly what XBLA is all about. I don't recall the first successful independent game on Xbox LIVE, but there was a point where it became clear to Microsoft and the rest of the community that XBLA wasn't just a means of getting old games on a newer console. It was in, I believe 2007 that Microsoft started saying to publishers "NO" to updated remakes, and "YES!!!" to new independent games.
More recently there has been a lot of press about how controlling Microsoft is and how expensive certain aspects of the process can be, but there is also a back side logic to that. The more process driven the process of publishing a game to XBLA is, with checks at points along the way, the more likely the developer is doing the things they must do in order to get ready for the next step. Add to that, the cost of having to have your code undergo another system test, isn't so much to make it difficult to make money as it is to force developers to take time (with the free/included bug testing) to get the job done right.
I don't know how close you are to developers, I've watched people who think they know exactly how to code beautiful code get their asses handed to them in a review because in a professional environment, when top notch quality is required the first time out, they fail to deliver. And then it's ALL your fault for requiring that the code doesn't break everything else. I've also seen beautiful code, code that runs so efficiently and well, it actually makes you weep and proud for/of the developer. It is an amazing skill to be able to write efficient code. You don't just have it as a developer, and you don't learn it in school.
So, I empathize with the developers that have complained about Microsoft process, even with Valve, but to be honest I've been in the position that Microsoft has been in myself of having developers want to publish code onto your system and thinking they now their stuff when in fact they don't. Their code runs in an isolated testing situation, not in a real world environment. The former is not anywhere near good enough.
I think Microsoft has done awesome work with independent games.
