| Goatseye said: During the X360 heyday on the Arcade Games front, MS required Indie developers to have a publisher as a form of quality control. Valve doesn't do that and their Greenlight program is apparently a facade. |
Well to be honest, that kinda a shitty way of getting there. Quality control should involve some sort of intelligent process and criteria paired with people actually playing the games, not a simple publisher check. That largely works to restrict indie developers as a very slapdash solution. Nintendo used to have a quality control policy which required the dev to have a devoted office space, which became problematic for some smaller devs for obvious reasons, so they got rid of that program, because it was the wrong solution to the problem.
It is also worth noting that the problem is much different on consoles than on Steam. Steam has a barrier of entry of 100$ to enter greenlight, whereas console development takes significantly more money. Additionally, you typically have some sort of entity checking the game to make sure that it at least works and meets certain criteria (simple things like a menu or a dynamic loading screen).
Basically the barrier for entry is higher on consoles and the quality check is also slightly higher than on Steam. Not saying these are perfect solutions, just that these are radically different ecosystems and as such, different solutions may be necessary.
