Zanten said:
Ehhhh, it might have helped with keeping out the muck, (although stuff like the patching fee actually kept devs from trying to patch glitched games,) but the old publisher policies were rife with their own issues; for one thing, many of the Publishers involved were, to put it bluntly, complete dicks and abused the crap out of their role. Given Microsoft would assign a limited number of 'slots' to each, based I believe on some objective measure of the Publisher's size or sales... in any case, only publishers who sold physical games at retail qualified for these slots, and because the slots were limited, publishers would often use their 'supply' as leverage. A developer looking to release on the Xbox 360 would sometimes end up having to either accept insane conditions, ("If we publish for you, not only do you have to give us a cut of the revenue from the 360 platform, you have to give us a cut from ALL the platforms, even the ones that you could self-publish on.") or simply not publish on the Xbox 360 at all. And since the Parity clause meant if you published anywhere else first, you COULDN'T publish on Xbox 360 afterwards, plenty of devs were hesitant to burn that particular bridge.
So at best you were signing up with a 'partner' who, really, didn't contribute anything except a 'ration token' that only existed because Microsoft created that sort of artificial scarcity, a Publisher who in exchange for the token would often get a piece of the ENTIRE pie, not just the part they were 'helping' with. They weren't contributing to development costs, weren't doing aaaanything to help make the game, just holding a golden key with one hand, and holding the other out for payment.
The kicker is, this option was viewed as the lesser of two evils compared to publishing with Microsoft, with whom publishing meant giving the platform cut, and a publisher's cut, and agreeing to timed exclusivity at minimum. Given announcing to the world that your game will be coming out on Xbox 360 first generated a fair bit of bad PR, and hurt sales potential on future platforms, it was an option devs wanted to avoid at all costs. And said costs were, generally, pretty severe.
Reports from one Dev suggested that getting his title released on the Xbox 360 was vastly more expensive, and time consuming, than releasing on ANY of the other platforms, without really offering enough revenue to make the whole ordeal worth it. So it wasn't just a matter of whether a developer could afford it; more and more, it became a matter of 'Why am I bothering with all this junk at all, when I can go publish over there, ignore the Xbox platform entirely, and probably make more money in the long run?"
So by the time the Xbox One was readying for release, the indie devs were starting to drop away in droves and pass on the Xbox One altogether, which is why Microsoft ended up changing their policies to begin with. Because it wasn't just the shovelware devs that were leaving, it was actual indie devs who made games audiences LIKED, games that did well on their own merit. If they hadn't removed the Publisher requirement, forget just bad indie games, Microsoft would have been lucky to get that many GOOD ones on their platform, or indie games at all. =P
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Anywhooo, back on topic I go. x3
To be specific, I do believe that there should be a gateway, as it were, even if it's a small team making sure that the game is not complete crap, making sure we don't get flooded with Flappy Bird clones, etc. Everything that has been streamlined, in terms of application time and cost, is great, but there should definitely not be any form of automated 'let em in when the counter strikes ten,' ala Greenlight. Right now Sony seeeems to be doing okay, if a bit over-enthusiastic, and I am hoping they'll reign that in and be a tad more discerning. If nothing else, I haven't yet seen any disasters on PS4 that match Soda Drinker Pro, and God knows those 'developers' (very loosely speaking) would get on PS4 if they had the chance. =P
But just like unmoderated self-publishing is getting abused by crap developers, Microsoft's old policies got abused by crap publishers. =P A balance needs to be found between the two, that will benefit both the developers who actually release games that draw an audience, and the audience that won't have to dig through mountains of crap to find it.
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