Former Microsoft engineer disagrees with vision for the Xbox 360

The team at Polygon shared a fascinating summary of former Microsoft developer Nat Brown’s blog a few days ago. He expresses his disappointment with the direction Microsoft has taken the Xbox, failing to capitalize on the “stumbling failures” of Sony and Nintendo while making a number of mistakes with the platform. The biggest of these mistakes is a lack of support for indie development — Brown has extreme distaste for the difference between the publishing models for XBLA and XBLIG (Xbox Live Indie Games). The other major issue Brown has with the direction of the Xbox 360 platform is the UI functionality — he pulls no punches, arguing that the “device OS and almost the entire user experience outside the first two levels of the dashboard are creaky, slow, and full-of-shit.”

There has been a clear shift in this generation of consoles to a new vision of the console as an entertainment center, as opposed to a box designed only for playing video games. Some of these changes have been very well received: one of the differences between gaming on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 is that the Xbox 360 facilitates cross-game and cross-app conversations in parties — someone could be playing Street Fighter online having a conversation with their father who is watching a Netflix movie, for instance. In any case, it is difficult to make a strong case for the Xbox 360 as anything but a giant success for Microsoft, considering how successful it has been on the marketplace.

What do you think of Brown’s critique of the direction Microsoft has taken the Xbox platform? Let us know in the comments below. It is an especially interesting time for this sort of reflection, as an announcement for Microsoft’s successor to the Xbox 360 almost certainly looms on the horizon.

Source:  Polygon