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Forums - Microsoft - Microsoft is passionate about indies, will reveal strategy “very soon”, says Lionhead

landguy1 on 19 July 2013
kitler53 said:

google "team meat" and you'll get plenty of insight to any number extreemly vocal complaints from the indie scence towards MS for the last 2-3 years.  that's actually the point, this isn't a "oh we just having announced a xbone strategy" thing.  MS has been in the bad with the indies for a long time now which makes these PR statements even more disingenuous. 

sony is getting better, indies have been vocal about it and more importantly the huge number of timed (and possibly fully) exclusive indie titles coming to ps4/vita says it all.  indies, in general, don't want to work with MS anymore.  this is a huge turn-around from the early days when castle crashers, limbo, braid, fez, shank, and a ton of other big indie games where exclusive to MS.

the critical point of contention is being able to self publish.  sony allows it now.  nintendo allows it now.  ms does not and has officially stated as such.   ...well, not unless you develop for windows which means also supporting other devices (like the surface which doesn't have a controller meaning games have to be re-worked for new control schemes).   if ms changes from their aforementioned statement: it's xbox 180 again.

There are hundreds of indies out there and having a few that might have been given more love years ago by M$ doesn't mean much.  We heard the same thing about the PS3 and that didn't seem to be a problem long term.  I am sure that Sony has put a large focus on this to do exactly what everyone wants, strong games support on the PS4(and hopefullty the XBone).



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Xenostar on 19 July 2013
landguy1 said:
Zekkyou said:
In all honesty it feels more that they have come to see how important the indie community is and are now doing another 180 on the matter, just behind closed doors. As long as they bring proper support come launch day, all is well.

I have seen a number of comments similar to this.  How do any of the people associated with or posting on VGChartz have any real idea how M$ has been dealing with indies from the start?  We have no idea...  We also have no idea how Sony has been dealing with them.  I am sure it will come out in the distant future, but we will have no real idea for some time.  The few "articles" that I have found on the net pertaining to this don't have any real info, they just seem to be "bloggers" and "writers" that are sharing an opinion but no real info on the matter. 

If we step back and look at this a little different, we can see that the XBone has the Windows RT OS running on it.  The Win RT OS has 100,000+ apps now available to it.  Do we really think that M$ isn't going to have some ability to run most if not all of those apps on the XBone?  Now, of course a large chunk of those are silly and stupid, but what this will do is allow any developer to make a game that works on the 100+ million windows 8 pc's and with probably small changes also work on XBone.  Will these apps be AAA games?  NO, but most independant games usually aren't anyway.  But, they will allow people to go after creating new and unique things to the XBone.

Just my opinion, but that's the whole point of these posts on here anyway isn't it?

I know because i worked on an xbla game at a previous job and it was not the greatest experience dealing with MS, weve also seen many other indie devs talk vocally about how bad they found it ( See Braid and Fez Devs and many more ).

Its something MS really need to work on and i really hope that they mean it this time. Xbox is a massive viable platform and most likely will be next gen too, so we (devs) dont need unecesary barriers. 

And dont bother comparing it to Win RT apps, the process is completley differnt to XBLA. It shouldnt be but right now it very much is. I understand they dont want XBLA full of fart apps like XBIG was, but a very simple approval process compared to what is currently in place would stop that. 



Muffin31190 on 19 July 2013
sales2099 said:
This indie X1 bad rep kinda strikes me as silly.....XBLA and Xbox Indie set the bar for this gen. In terms of quality and sheer quantity.

It ain't like MS never had them on their side, they always did. And now they will keep it strong, that is the luxury of not being released yet, that you can tweak your policies.

As far as consoles go MS in the beginning showed what indies could do, but they did not follow through as well as they could have with indie games.
And so that left a huge hole to fill so that Nintendo and Sony could take advantage of that (more Sony).
But XBLA did not set the Indie bar this gen it was PC with the likes of Minecraft and the umpteenth amount of  games that were released on this platform before any other and set the bar what would be coming to consoles if at all.
So because of the polocies that MS has said with the X1 and it getting a bad rep with Indie developers it is completely understandable, especially when you have a competing company going the Opposite route and virtually letting Developers be their own publishers.



Blood_Tears on 19 July 2013

They are likely back peddling on certain polices and working on signing exclusive contracts so they can have more info to share at Gamescom.



RenderMonk on 19 July 2013

"Microsoft is passionate about indies, will reveal strategy “very soon”......Just as soon as they've had time to fabricate something that closely resembles everything that Sony is doing, in a point by point, bullet point presentation.



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sales2099 on 19 July 2013
Muffin31190 said:
sales2099 said:
This indie X1 bad rep kinda strikes me as silly.....XBLA and Xbox Indie set the bar for this gen. In terms of quality and sheer quantity.

It ain't like MS never had them on their side, they always did. And now they will keep it strong, that is the luxury of not being released yet, that you can tweak your policies.

As far as consoles go MS in the beginning showed what indies could do, but they did not follow through as well as they could have with indie games.
And so that left a huge hole to fill so that Nintendo and Sony could take advantage of that (more Sony).
But XBLA did not set the Indie bar this gen it was PC with the likes of Minecraft and the umpteenth amount of  games that were released on this platform before any other and set the bar what would be coming to consoles if at all.
So because of the polocies that MS has said with the X1 and it getting a bad rep with Indie developers it is completely understandable, especially when you have a competing company going the Opposite route and virtually letting Developers be their own publishers.

Please don't use PC to defend Sony when I was clearly referring to the console space.



Xbox: Best hardware, Game Pass best value, best BC, more 1st party genres and multiplayer titles. 

 

sales2099 on 19 July 2013
RenderMonk said:
"Microsoft is passionate about indies, will reveal strategy “very soon”......Just as soon as they've had time to fabricate something that closely resembles everything that Sony is doing, in a point by point, bullet point presentation.

Except they will probably do more funding ;)



Xbox: Best hardware, Game Pass best value, best BC, more 1st party genres and multiplayer titles. 

 

Kresnik on 19 July 2013

Nsanity said:

 I'm not the author, so try harder.

This was an oddly defensive reply, especially to someone like TheProf who I would suggest has been here long enough to know that you're not the author of the article.

 

OT: Like Sales said, I don't think this should be any surprise since MS were heavy with indies most of this generation.  Although why it's taking them so long to push for it on X1 is baffling to me.



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landguy1 on 19 July 2013
Xenostar said:
landguy1 said:
Zekkyou said:
In all honesty it feels more that they have come to see how important the indie community is and are now doing another 180 on the matter, just behind closed doors. As long as they bring proper support come launch day, all is well.

I have seen a number of comments similar to this.  How do any of the people associated with or posting on VGChartz have any real idea how M$ has been dealing with indies from the start?  We have no idea...  We also have no idea how Sony has been dealing with them.  I am sure it will come out in the distant future, but we will have no real idea for some time.  The few "articles" that I have found on the net pertaining to this don't have any real info, they just seem to be "bloggers" and "writers" that are sharing an opinion but no real info on the matter. 

If we step back and look at this a little different, we can see that the XBone has the Windows RT OS running on it.  The Win RT OS has 100,000+ apps now available to it.  Do we really think that M$ isn't going to have some ability to run most if not all of those apps on the XBone?  Now, of course a large chunk of those are silly and stupid, but what this will do is allow any developer to make a game that works on the 100+ million windows 8 pc's and with probably small changes also work on XBone.  Will these apps be AAA games?  NO, but most independant games usually aren't anyway.  But, they will allow people to go after creating new and unique things to the XBone.

Just my opinion, but that's the whole point of these posts on here anyway isn't it?

I know because i worked on an xbla game at a previous job and it was not the greatest experience dealing with MS, weve also seen many other indie devs talk vocally about how bad they found it ( See Braid and Fez Devs and many more ).

Its something MS really need to work on and i really hope that they mean it this time. Xbox is a massive viable platform and most likely will be next gen too, so we (devs) dont need unecesary barriers. 

And dont bother comparing it to Win RT apps, the process is completley differnt to XBLA. It shouldnt be but right now it very much is. I understand they dont want XBLA full of fart apps like XBIG was, but a very simple approval process compared to what is currently in place would stop that. 

An actual experience is much more proof than what most of the info out there seems to be.  What kind of things did M$ actually do different(than other platforms) that makes it difficult to work with them? 



Muffin31190 on 19 July 2013
sales2099 said:
Muffin31190 said:
sales2099 said:
This indie X1 bad rep kinda strikes me as silly.....XBLA and Xbox Indie set the bar for this gen. In terms of quality and sheer quantity.

It ain't like MS never had them on their side, they always did. And now they will keep it strong, that is the luxury of not being released yet, that you can tweak your policies.

As far as consoles go MS in the beginning showed what indies could do, but they did not follow through as well as they could have with indie games.
And so that left a huge hole to fill so that Nintendo and Sony could take advantage of that (more Sony).
But XBLA did not set the Indie bar this gen it was PC with the likes of Minecraft and the umpteenth amount of  games that were released on this platform before any other and set the bar what would be coming to consoles if at all.
So because of the polocies that MS has said with the X1 and it getting a bad rep with Indie developers it is completely understandable, especially when you have a competing company going the Opposite route and virtually letting Developers be their own publishers.

Please don't use PC to defend Sony when I was clearly referring to the console space.

Who said I was defending Sony, I actually shared your opinion to some degree. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of Indie developers have Stated their dislike of the XB1's policies regarding publishing titles on XBLA

But in your eyes the obvious FACTS with my statement about PC means I am defending Sony ... Riiggghhhttt