Indie developers rejecting Microsoft

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BladeVenom

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How Microsoft is trying—but failing—to court indie game developers

At last week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, record numbers of industry players converged to showcase their latest titles. In full force were smaller, independent developers, showing off their indie games on a variety of hardware: Mac and Windows laptops, and iOS and Android devices.

Windows-based devices, however, were conspicuously absent—outside of the Microsoft booth, of course.

This is troubling. GDC is the place where game developers and publishers convene to talk shop, and neither Windows 8/RT nor Windows Phone was a significant part of anyone's conversation.
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title is a little misleading-- indie developers are specifically rejecting Windows 8 Store...

devices == Windows 8 RT/ Windows Phone etc that rely on the windows 8 store for app deployment.

not Microsoft/Windows in general.
 
Problem is that Windows had always a huge amount of freedom now MS is taking it away.. I see its working for them very well. Why even bother developing apps going through MS bullshit when they can HTML 5 a web app and thats it?
 
This is about user base right now ... the Indie market is booming right now between Android, iOS, and the PC ... all three platforms have large user bases and decent monetization available ... the MS store and platform is still too immature to interest developers when much easier and lucrative platforms are available to them ... MS needs to pony up some development money or incentives to bring developers on board ;)
 
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BladeVenom said:
MS has XNA for indie developers. Oh wait, they just recently announced they are retiring it. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/185894/Its_official_XNA_is_dead.php

MS doesn't really care about computer games. Sure one day they say they do, but the next day the will go out of their way to screw over gamers.
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I made a bunch of games and put them on the 360 Indie marketplace. I really appreciated what Microsoft did for Indie developers when they first launched XNA and the Indie marketplace. The framework was easy to use and they had a lot of good example projects and a decent community to help people get started.

But they never really improved on it and it actually got worse. When they did the big 360 dashboard update they hid the Indie games section away so it was really hard to find on the dashboard. When they did more dashboard updates they made it even harder to find. Back when Indie games first launched on 360 new games would get fairly good exposure and a ton of downloads because they were only a few button presses away. Now days Indie games don't even get a tenth of the downloads they used to because they are so hidden away.

When they launched Kinect they never allowed Indie developers to use any of the features. They did an update to the XNA framework so it could be used with Windows Phone 7 and forced new 360 games to use it. It was a big pain to convert some things over so they would run in the new framework. They never made XNA compatible with the new versions of Visual Studio which is also a huge pain. They pretty much abandoned XNA when Windows 8 was announced.

They haven't announced anything regarding indie games on the next Xbox which leads me to believe they won't have anything.
So I've pretty much given up on any Microsoft Marketplace and for my next game I'll probably try getting it on Steam green light or something similar.
 
sharknice said:
I made a bunch of games and put them on the 360 Indie marketplace. I really appreciated what Microsoft did for Indie developers when they first launched XNA and the Indie marketplace. The framework was easy to use and they had a lot of good example projects and a decent community to help people get started.

But they never really improved on it and it actually got worse. When they did the big 360 dashboard update they hid the Indie games section away so it was really hard to find on the dashboard. When they did more dashboard updates they made it even harder to find. Back when Indie games first launched on 360 new games would get fairly good exposure and a ton of downloads because they were only a few button presses away. Now days Indie games don't even get a tenth of the downloads they used to because they are so hidden away.

When they launched Kinect they never allowed Indie developers to use any of the features. They did an update to the XNA framework so it could be used with Windows Phone 7 and forced new 360 games to use it. It was a big pain to convert some things over so they would run in the new framework. They never made XNA compatible with the new versions of Visual Studio which is also a huge pain. They pretty much abandoned XNA when Windows 8 was announced.

They haven't announced anything regarding indie games on the next Xbox which leads me to believe they won't have anything.
So I've pretty much given up on any Microsoft Marketplace and for my next game I'll probably try getting it on Steam green light or something similar.
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This is almost a word for word quote from my buddy that used to make indie games for the Xbox. He focuses entirely on ios and Android now.
 
Well its a step in a direction, whether it was right or wrong, they atleast gave indie a chance. If it was such a brilliant idea, Microsoft wouldn't have let it go. Lets be honest, most indie games just dont suit their target audience.
 
Wanna see how much Microsoft cares about games? Turn on an updated 360; it's like TV Guide runs the 360 dashboard with a small games section.

Indie games are all cool 'n all but we wanna show the kids this new Drake video, YOLO SWAG.
 
BladeVenom said:
In full force were smaller, independent developers, showing off their indie games on a variety of hardware: Mac and Windows laptops, and iOS and Android devices.

Windows-based devices, however, were conspicuously absent[/URL]
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Proof reading fail for the author. Or it could be possibly blamed on Microsoft for their branding schemes.
 
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