Microsoft's "indie" gaming strategy for Xbox One

[Vetteman94]

disolitude said:

fauzman said:
I don't get it. In that case why not just allow windows8 etc games to be selfpublished as well. Also not all devs may want to publish on RT/8/phone. Wouldn't this just be more of a hassle for them.

In addition, from dev comments they seem to far pref

Win 8 apps and games are self published. There are members on this forums that made windows 8 apps.

MS just wants people who want to self publish games to treat them like apps and make them for Windows first. They will probably talk about cross platform play, unified leaderboards and other cool things to justify it as well as the obvious broader reach of users that the games can be sold to.

In terms of hassle, yeah some devs may only want to make console games and not optimize for touch screens. Those devs obviously don't realize the huge market they are leaving on the table by not publishing on Windows 8, Android, iOS...I'm not sure Microsoft can do much there other than show them some numbers in terms of potential gamers they are missing out on.

 

It may be a huge market but is it one that will buy their games?   Most Indie games start out between 9.99-14.99. How well do games at those prices sell?  I believe every game on the top 100 games sold on Android is 4.99 or less, Minecraft being the exception at 6.99.  That would be a pretty hard sell to an indie developer to have to design the game to work on so many different devices with ouy a decent return on it. I just dont see games priced in that range being something that mobile users or even Windows 8 app users as something that will justify the work put in on it.