7 years ago
The Witness kicks off April’s Games with Gold
Spring has sprung and April is less than a week away, so let’s get prepared for a month of rainy days with a new round of Games with Gold. April …
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9 years ago
The Witness might be coming to Xbox One
Xbox gamers tend to remember Jonathan Blow as the man who almost single-handedly kickstarted the independent games market on Xbox with Braid before swearing the Xbox 360 off, repeatedly ripping …
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9 years ago
The Witness Rated For Xbox One
After being in development since 2009, The Witness comes as a highly anticipated release for 2016. It was initially perceived to be a console exclusive on the PS4. However, according …
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12 years ago
“Working with Microsoft is great” says XBLA developer Ska Studios
Following on from some of the negative XBLA press that has recently hit the headlines, Ska Studios’ James Silva has decided to set the record straight on his experiences …
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Jon Blow and Team Meat done with Xbox
In recent interviews with Edge and Eurogamer, the makers of Braid and Super Meat Boy expressed their frustration with developing for Xbox Live Arcade. As independent developers, taking on the heated business of console development on top of development costs is more stress than its worth, say the developers.
“The overhead cost of just developing for those consoles is insane,” explained Tommy Refenes from Team Meat. “It costs zero dollars to develop on Steam if you already have a computer. When you look at PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo, you have to buy thousand dollar dev kits and pay for certification and pay for testing and pay for localisation – you have to do all these things and at the end of the day it’s like, ‘I could have developed for other platforms and it would’ve been easier.'”
On top of development costs, there are lawyers, fees and ambiguity to sort through that cause an equally overwhelming headache. Ed McMillen from Team Meat said that to bring his studio’s games to consoles, his team would need “some magical middleman who would just appear and do all of our business for us… We went in and found out what it was like to develop for a console and the reality is there’s no loyalty on either side and it’s a business. And when you step in to that business arena it goes from us making art and it turns into business.”