Xbox 360 Indie games

[bcass]

Microsoft will bring the entirety of Xbox Live over to the new console. And it'll be trivial because the hardware will be fully compatible, on a hardware level, not via emulation. They won't dump the indie channel because they desperately need indie devs onboard for their Windows Phone 7 service. Being able to simultaneously publish on the 360 is a nice incentive/bonus for developers.

I don't think they deliberately made the downloadable content (not just XBLIG titles) harder to find with this new update, I think it was just down to complacency/incompetence/misdirection towards media content.

[Sketcz]

Microsoft will bring the entirety of Xbox Live over to the new console.

I'd like to hope so. But didn't MS also state at one point that any games achieving under a certain Metacritic score, or number of sales, would be pulled?

My concern is that maintaining the servers costs them money. If XBLIG isn't pulling its weight in relation to Cost of Running VS Profits Earned, they might do away with it, and then people's copies on their HDDs will cease working.

I only say all this out of a love for the indie community. They do things that bigger developers, with bigger overheads, can't risk doing. Which is why we see some great stuff. But from what I've heard, from indie devs on XBLIG, it's not the profit-for-all people think it is. Many games, even great ones, do extremely poorly, and therefore take up resources by existing, without bringing in any cash for MS.

Or am I wrong? Does anyone have official figures on how much it costs MS to maintain XBLIG? They will only maintain it for as long as it poses some fiscal worth to them.

[toythatkills]

Many games, even great ones, do extremely poorly, and therefore take up resources by existing, without bringing in any cash for MS.

Or am I wrong?

Possibly, for what my opinion is worth to you.

XBLIG creators pay $99 a year to release and have their games hosted on the service. For the ones that aren't selling they're just sitting on a server doing nothing, and I imagine the $99 covers that. For the ones that are selling, MS take a 30% cut or something, so that covers that.

It's not making masses of money, but enough to sustain itself for now at least.

[averybluemonkey]

Regarding the discontinuation of Xbox Live for the original Xbox. This was due to technical limitations of the original implementation preventing new features, not the costs of hosting a few map packs on a server in the basement at Redmond. You can guarantee that a lot of time and money will have been spent to ensure future additions can be added without breaking backwards compatibility in the event of a frozen codeline for the current system, it's just too much of a headache otherwise and will cost them more in the long run providing backports during any dual operating period.

And frankly I would be amazed if XBLIG even remotely covers it's cost. Bandwidth is negligable, that's not where the costs lie. The costs are in the XNA 360-baseport development and support, web support and documentation, community manager, dashboard-integration and test, plus general employee overheads. You're easily looking at a minimum of $500-600k a year for this, and I'd be stunned if XBLIG is generating anything remotely like that for them.

[bcass]

Given how patchy the web service is (for developers) and how infrequently the software libraries are updated, I'm not convinced that there's actually a "dedicated" team as such. If there is, then it's absolutely tiny.

[toythatkills]

You're easily looking at a minimum of $500-600k a year for this, and I'd be stunned if XBLIG is generating anything remotely like that for them.

The Minecraft clones alone will have generated four times that last year. They've sold something like 2m units at $3 each between the four of them, and they're still consistently selling now.

Also, there is no community manager and little support, the point of the App Hub forums is that they help each other. Microsoft barely monitors it at all.

[averybluemonkey]

Given how patchy the web service is (for developers) and how infrequently the software libraries are updated, I'm not convinced that there's actually a "dedicated" team as such. If there is, then it's absolutely tiny.

That's why I gave a very conservative estimate for a small 6-7 man team, they don't have to be solely dedicated to the service for the hours to add up. There's always a lot of behind the scenes work on frameworks and middleware solutions that the public almost never see.

[averybluemonkey]

The Minecraft clones alone will have generated four times that last year. They've sold something like 2m units at $3 each between the four of them, and they're still consistently selling now.

Also, there is no community manager and little support, the point of the App Hub forums is that they help each other. Microsoft barely monitors it at all.

The issue is the rapid tail off after the high volume titles, I spent three months on an XBLIG release before permanently shelving it as the monetary issues became painfully obvious, and the fact that the eco-system is highly unhealthy. The Minecraft clones have been successfull but they are flash in the pans, before they came along there were hardly any big hitters, the biggest barely managing more than a couple of hundred thousand sales. These clones have a limited window of opportunity before the real deal hits XBLA when they will vanish, they may have paid their way this year but it isn't repeatable and I would be surprised if they cover the investment cost to date for the platform. As someone who has used the development tools to code with I've been very impressed by the amount of work that has gone into them, creating something like XNA takes a lot of time and money.

One other thing to factor into estimated revenue earnings is that you can't make a blanket X sales = Y revenue argument. Ignoring the fact that the system uses MS points, a nebulous commodity, there are far too many variables in the form of currency fluctuations in the monetary market and the fact that sales will not be universally distributed to make strong assumptions of this form.

[bcass]

Although it's not hugely profitable for most people (or Microsoft, I suspect), as a bold experiment, I consider it to be a fantastic success. There's been nothing like it on a home console before (Net Yaroze being the closest, but a fundamentally different prospect). The (free) tools are also unprecedented. C# is a great modern language to learn and the XNA framework itself is nothing short of miraculous in the functionality that it offers. I reckon we'll see something much more coherent on the next console. The cross-development model is obviously very important to Microsoft and I can easily see them making it into something much more interesting next time round.

[toythatkills]

I spent three months on an XBLIG release before permanently shelving it as the monetary issues became painfully obvious, and the fact that the eco-system is highly unhealthy.

You've missed the point of the service entirely, but I am getting serious deja vu. I'm sure I've had this exact argument with you before so it's probably better that we just leave it. There's no point going through it again.

[averybluemonkey]

You've missed the point of the service entirely, but I am getting serious deja vu. I'm sure I've had this exact argument with you before so it's probably better that we just leave it. There's no point going through it again.

Ah the patronising is back, given how many XBLIG developers moaned about the same thing and haven't looked back after switching to PC development I am not the only one under the misconception that games should have a chance of becoming popular.

[bcass]

You've missed the point of the service entirely

Yep, it's not meant to be an iTunes app store equivalent IMO. It's about encouraging people to learn how to code, testing new ideas and learning the ropes of games development. Microsoft promote it heavily on university computer science degrees.

[averybluemonkey]

Although it's not hugely profitable for most people (or Microsoft, I suspect), as a bold experiment, I consider it to be a fantastic success. There's been nothing like it on a home console before (Net Yaroze being the closest, but a fundamentally different prospect). The (free) tools are also unprecedented. C# is a great modern language to learn and the XNA framework itself is nothing short of miraculous in the functionality that it offers. I reckon we'll see something much more coherent on the next console. The cross-development model is obviously very important to Microsoft and I can easily see them making it into something much more interesting next time round.

To be fair the Atari Jaguar has been an open source home console for many years now, it's just a bit harder to program for.
I also like the XNA toolset a lot but I think that forcing people down the C# route was a mistake myself, it's a major problem for people porting from other platforms. With Windows Phone in the case of porting from Android and Qt you basicly have to rewrite the entire game from scratch and it's just not worth it, if they'd provided a C++ API I think we'd have seen a much larger uptake on that particular platform.

[averybluemonkey]

Yep, it's not meant to be an iTunes app store equivalent IMO. It's about encouraging people to learn how to code, testing new ideas and learning the ropes of games development. Microsoft promote it heavily on university computer science degrees.

I'd be pretty suspicious of any degrees doing this though. The bulk of the work is in using their APIs and tool chains with true core game programming fundamentals hidden within the framework that you never touch.

[bcass]

Ah the patronising is back, given how many XBLIG developers moaned about the same thing and haven't looked back after switching to PC development I am not the only one under the misconception that games should have a chance of becoming popular.

You don't have to "switch" to PC development. Games developed using XNA will run on PC with absolutely minimal changes to the code. In fact, to get stuff running on PC you're just essentially commenting/regioning out the console-specific code segments (which is a 5 minute job). There's a number of XNA games on Steam.