Editorial update:
Braid developer Jonathan Blow has posted a blog update to set the record straight regarding the statements reported on below. The full blog post makes for interesting reading, but the gist of it is that Jonathan Blow believes his statements were taken out of context and he does not want anyone to think that he entered into an interview specifically to sling mud at Microsoft’s approach to indie games on the Xbox LIVE platform. A number of topics were covered in the Edge Magazine interview, with opinions about Xbox LIVE and PSN indie game support only being a select potion of the interview. “There is one bit about the way Microsoft and Sony, respectively, handle their portfolio strategies with regard to indie games. There are positives and negatives mentioned regarding each party. Sony does come out a bit ahead, but our discussion was much more even-handed,” said Blow.
Original Article:
In an interview with Edge Magazine, Braid dev Jonathan Blow has criticised Microsoft’s “conservative” policies for riskier indie prospects on the Xbox LIVE Indie Games portal, as well as the Xbox LIVE Arcade.
“Microsoft has provided the lower barrier to entry with Xbox LIVE Indie Games, but most of them are not very good – I don’t think that’s a controversial statement,” Blow said. “So if you’re thinking about the impact of indie games on the whole forum of games then probably Sony has done more because of the way they curate the games they put on [PSN] – they’re actually looking for games that are artful or experimental.”
Somewhat controversially, Microsoft recently dumped Zombie Cow’s sex education game, Privates, for its “inherently sexual nature.” Somewhat less controversially, perhaps, Microsoft also refuses to have anything whatsoever to do with ThriXXX’s Kinect untitled sex game, but probably because it’s exclusively for pervosexuals.
“I mean, [Sony] published Linger In Shadows; Microsoft would never have done that – that’s not even really a game,” adds Blow. “XBLA is more conservative than PSN but it still has a larger audience so it’s much more commercially feasible, as long as you can get your game noticed – which is getting harder over time, but is still possible. Some of the stuff Microsoft signs and publishes on XBLA is pretty bad; some of it is very good. Super Meat Boy is obviously a really good game. I wish they had promoted that more heavily, but Live Arcade is part of a bureaucratic machine, which is part of a bigger bureaucratic machine and so on – what more can they do?”
Discuss Microsoft’s approach to indie games on Xbox LIVE on the MyGaming forum.
Loading ...
