tsk tsk…what a pessimistic point view.

Broadcast yourself to everyone else! Imagine being able to stream your halo/Minecraft/forza games to everyone. Make a name for yourself and maybe earn some $.

This all but confirms (in my mind) that Twitch is going to be heavily baked into the next xbox. Which is soooooooo awesome. I’m glad they’ll be throwing a bone to existing 360 owners though by having a twitch app.

Calling captain obvious.

I still don’t know why there was such uproar on the internet about this. Did someone honestly think that Microsoft would not allow you to play a singleplayer game or watch a dvd/bluray movie without being online?

I like how someone put it on twitter (sorry, can’t remember who), but essentially – the next xbox will operate pretty similar to steam as far as “always online” is concerned.

I know its easy to say, but indie developers don’t have to live game to game. Just like writers or real estate agents or other self employed workers, if they have a successful game, they could give themselves an annual salary ($50k or $75k or whatever a year), and invest the rest of their money. When you release a new game, you can give yourself a little bonus, but just put the rest of the money into savings and don’t touch it. When that time comes when you either don’t have a game to release or your latest release is a bomb, you have your savings to “pay yourself” with.

Like I said above, its not really different than a real estate agent who doesn’t have a salary and only makes money when they help sell/buy a house. Good agents give themselves a salary and save the rest to help them through lean times when they don’t sell as many houses.

You don’t think Journey spurred sales of PS3s? Or that someone out there bought an xbox just to play castle crashers?

Zero what?

If you’re answering my millionaire question, I’d say most of them. Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid), certainly. Dan Paladin & Tom Fulp (creators of Castle Crashers) – definitely. Edmund McMillen andTommy Refenes (creators of Super Meat Boy) – absolutely! SMB passed the 1 million mark in January of 2012. Even if you cut out Microsoft’s and Steam’s and Uncle Sam’s shares, you still have a ton of money left – and that was over a year ago.

Anyways I think you get the point. Considering each of those games has sold a million copies or more, none of those developers are worse off for it.

Yeah. I think if there’s a valid complaint about XBLIG, is that Microsoft was almost too hands off with it. They didn’t do much to help filter/control the content. But unfortunately, if you want a true “indie” experience – isn’t that kind of what you get?

I think an ideal setup would be a cross between XBLA (where Microsoft works with developers somewhat) and XBLIG (where crowdsourcing is used to rate/review/rank games).

Games move consoles. Doesn’t matter if they’re arcade/indie/AAA titles. I’m sure plenty of people bought 360s back in 2007/2008 for braid and castle crashers, just like I’m sure people picked up ps3s just to play journey.

and your point is? Minecraft might be a bit of a stretch, since it was already an established IP, but my point still stands. For developers without a big name publisher standing behind them, the xbox 360 was/is an extremely viable platform and Microsoft is a powerful publisher that will help get your game sold and make you rich!

I think you need to go look up indie gaming in your dictionary. Just because Microsoft worked with the developer(s) to publish the game and publicize it through xbla doesn’t make it any less indie.

how many of those developers is now a millionaire? none of that would have been possible without the 360 and xbla.

I’m not saying its a pain in the ass to work with Microsoft, and they have a ton of restrictions and face palm type requirements, but the end result is generally worth all that pain.

Uhm, Castle Crashers, Braid, Minecraft, Trials HD, Fez, Shadow Complex, super meat boy…the list goes on and on. Indie gaming has done pretty fine with the xbox and Microsoft. What’s struggled is the indie gaming program that they tried to run through the xna thing. That was the true “indie” platform, but frankly none of the games were ever that great. The best was probably “I killed a zombie” and I can’t think of any more.