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

Fusioncode on 19 July 2013
Stinky said:
MS has helped make many indie devs into stars; we all know Jon Blow, Phil Fish and Team Meat are. Xbox' indie channel has also been valuable for devs. MS is unfairly maligned for some reason, they've done more for indies than any other console.


And most of those devs despise Microsoft. They're changing some of their practices now, but before they treating indie developers like garbage. Sony is emraing indie developers full force. They had a ten minute showcase at their E3 presentation to show off cool, independent, and innovative games. Microsoft showed off Minecraft.



Sigs are dumb. And so are you!

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sales2099 on 19 July 2013
Muffin31190 said:
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

Well its been a trend for them to use PC as a crutch. But then again I wasn't clear that I was purely talking about consoles. So nm.



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

 

Necromunda on 19 July 2013

Am I the only one who get's even more pissed at this shit? They could care less about indies, or the gamer community, they are just following Sony so they don't fall behind this gen...

Honestly, if Sony wasn't doing all the things that they are, Microsoft wouldn't be changing anything, Sony is simply forcing their hand. Saying all is well in regards to this is the equivalent of being punched in the face and that person saying "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean it! It won't happen again!", but all in all, they STILL PUNCHED YOU IN THE FACE.



Egann on 19 July 2013

The real problem: Yes XBox Live Arcade set the bar for Indies in gen 7, but things have changed. This is gen 8, now, and everybody--even Nintendo--is giving Indy developers so much attention when designing their marketplaces that XBox Live Arcade is no longer competitive. In fact, it's outright oppressive compared to the marketplaces on PC, Wii U, or that the PS4 is supposed to have.

Microsoft thought they could rest on their laurels and focus on big publisher concerns, like DRM. They thought very wrong.



Xenostar on 19 July 2013
landguy1 said:
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? 

In our experience they wanted to much control over the project, by the end it was more the game they wanted to make than the one we wanted to make. And because they were the publisher because they dont allow self publishing, you couldnt really argue. Its a rediculous mind set they have where they believe all games must have a publisher or it wont be good enough. 



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Nsanity on 19 July 2013
theprof00 said:
Nsanity said:
theprof00 said:
The OP makes it seem like this was all a plan all along.
This is more like "look how we completely reversed policy again".
Wise decision to approach it this way MS.

I'm not the author, so try harder.

OP doesn't stand for Original poster but original post.

Keep being defensive, it's extremely attractive on a grown man.

Except it does.



Nsanity on 19 July 2013
Kresnik said:

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.

How so? His post was directed towards me and when confronted he then tried to spin it into something else.



Seikseruza 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.

To not include a platform because it doesn't fit in your arguments agenda is arrogant and you should no longer be taken seriously with anything you post.



bigd615 on 19 July 2013

Good news for indies as this will most likely be much more beneficial to the developers than any console maker. I realize many people said indies were a huge selling point, and they are, but they need to be on as many platforms as they can to be successful.



Kresnik on 20 July 2013

Nsanity said:

How so? His post was directed towards me and when confronted he then tried to spin it into something else.


When I read what he said, I read it as "original post".  Like I say, I'd consider you known for posting articles around here.  The fact that you put "VG247" at the top kind of further cemented it that you were posting an article rather than having written it yourself, something I'm sure Prof noticed.

There have been a number of occassions where I've criticised the content of the OP in a thread on VGChartz which has been a reposting of an article, but it's never an attack on the person posting the thread; it's a criticism of what the person who has written the article chose to put.

It just kinda felt like you were jumping to an assumption and then getting offended over a misunderstanding, and I've never seen you do that before.

But I'm veering into off-topic now, so I'll make this the last post on the matter.



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