Independent game developers face a lot of obstacles, from limited funding and AAA competition to marketing challenges and getting attention from an easily distracted press. But those hurdles can multiply when an indie developer decides to release a game on a console. Fez developer Phil Fish highlighted this fact last week, with a highly publicized complaint about being asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars in recertification fees to Microsoft in order to patch a known issue with the game.
Clashes between Microsoft and indie developers are not a new phenomenon. Since 2008, World of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel has been surveying 200 of his fellow independent developers about their feelings on various platforms. Last year's survey showed evidence that interest in Xbox Live Arcade was waning among developers, while interest in PlayStation 3 was surging. What's more, a 48 percent plurality of the developers described working with Microsoft on Xbox Live Arcade as "excruciating," a level surpassed only by individual cell phone carriers. Working with Steam, on the other hand, was considered "very easy" by 64 percent of developers in the survey.
Speaking to Ars Technica, Carmel clarified that those "excruciating" experiences centered on dealings with Microsoft Studios, the in-house publishing unit that releases independent XBLA games that don't have an established third-party publishing partner (like EA, Activision or Ubisoft). "Contract negotiations [with Microsoft Studios] are drawn out and adversarial," Carmel said. "I've heard many complaints about having to work with a producer, and their terms are the worst among all modern digital distribution channels." (Microsoft refused an opportunity to comment on this story.)
Not only does going through Microsoft Studios mean keeping your game exclusive to Xbox Live Arcade for a certain period of time after launch, but the outfit also takes an additional percentage of a game's revenues on top of the standard cut taken for all Xbox Live Arcade titles, Carmel said. "That's why we see savvy console developers like Supergiant [Bastion] and Klei [Shank] go through third-party publishers—those publishers get better terms from XBLA (directly) than a small developer could get from Microsoft Studios, and they can launch the game simultaneously on multiple platforms."
Avoiding that exclusivity clause is part of the reason Zeboyd games founder Robert Boyd said he didn't try for a full Xbox Live Arcade release for the recently released Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode 3. Instead, Boyd adapted the Steam version of the game for the less popular Xbox Live Indie Games channel, which has much less stringent certification requirements, but also receives much less promotion from Microsoft. Boyd said he sees the XBLIG release as a "courtesy to our fans" that still allowed the game to be ported to "as many platforms as possible."
The past is history
Boyd praised Microsoft for doing some "great things" for the indie game community, including creating the Indie Games area as a proving ground for low-budget developers in the first place. But he worries that the company has "stopped progressing as far as fostering indie games go, at the same time that everyone else is focusing on indie development more and more." He cites Steam's easy post-launch updates, Sony's extensive outreach efforts to indie developers, and even Nintendo's increasing focus on digital distribution as signs that Microsoft is falling behind in this area.
"Sure, Microsoft has a full schedule on XBLA right now, but if they want to continue to attract top talent to their platforms for 2013, 2014, and beyond, they need to step up their efforts and be more accommodating of smaller developers," Boyd said. "At the very least, they need to ease up on their patch rules. It doesn't matter how good your QA team is—if you're making something with the kind of complexity found in your typical modern game, you're not going to catch every bug the first time around. I really feel for [Fez programmer] Renaud Bedard, since I know how frustrating it is to find [out] about a bug and not be sure how to fix [it]."
Not all indie developers are so negative about the hassles of Xbox Live Arcade publishing. Derek Yu, whose cult hit PC game Spelunky was recently adapted for XBLA, said he went in to the port knowing full well that there were additional costs to doing business on consoles. "It didn't deter me because I was committed to developing a console game," he said. "In my opinion, the entire process of console development is prohibitive—not just the expenses but also the selection process and the time invested into understanding the platform. You should only do it if you have the resources and really want to be on a console."
But those "prohibitive" console development hurdles don't even serve any real purpose, according to Braid developer Jonathan Blow. While strict certification requirements (and their attendant temporal and monetary costs) may have made sense back in the disc-only days, Blow says, the process has become actively harmful in releasing today's downloadable indie titles.
"The certification processes of all these platform holders were based on the idea that all these steps they test are absolutely necessary for software to run robustly, and that software robustness is super-important for the health of their platform and its perception by customers," Blow said. "But look at iOS. There is almost no certification process for iOS, so by the Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo theory, the apps should be crashing all the time, everyone should think of iOS as sucky, etc. But in fact this is not what is happening. There is no public outcry for more testing and robustness of iOS software."
Blow called out console makers for micromanaging developers with certification requirements, like the need to include that ever-present "do not to turn off their console when a game is saving" message. The time spent developing and testing for minutia like this adds up, he said, arguing it could be better spent working on the games themselves.
"The edge that both Apple and Valve have going into the future is that they both genuinely care about the end-user experience and want to make it as good as possible," Blow said. "Which coincidentally seems to be the place that these consoles are handicapped due to their corporate culture. Can anyone look at the current 360 or PS3 dashboards and legitimately say that those are products of an entity that deeply cares about user experience?"
While upstarts like Ouya are trying to remove all the barriers that give indie console developers such headaches, Blow fears the current certification model might be too "baked into the DNA" of the established console makers to be changed any time soon.
"If the actual way the next-gen consoles work is much like the way they work now, they will be functionally archaic in the marketplace," he said. "Keep in mind that they have to compete with the iPad 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Any idea what the iPad 5 or 6 are going to look like, how powerful they are going to be, what other user experience benefits they are going to have? I sure don't."
reader comments
97