Megaspace hyper-rants!  Man things are getting heated here in MStar Towers.  For once it's not smash-and-grab Avatar Massage developers, but Microsoft themselves who are the target of my ire.

I've said repeatedly, here and in interviews and on the XNACCO website, that Microsoft deserve credit for the XBLIG project in general, and the XNA Framework in particular.  It's an excellent framework - flexible and powerful, relatively easy to comprehend and work with, and when used right it gives great results.  The ability to deploy code to the 360, Windows, Zune and (soon) Windows Phone 7 is a real boon to small-time developers seeking to maximise return on their codebase.  The guys like Shawn Hargreaves (who consistently gives his all to the framework and the community that use it) are a real credit to themselves and to Microsoft.  The commitment and devotion of the XNA development team is not, and should not, be in question.  XNA 4 reaches public release soon and it's a significant step forward in a lot of ways and they're to be congratulated.

What is less certain however is the supporting infrastructure in place around XBLIG releases.  The sales stats and dashboard lists are glitchy and prone to failure.  Mommy's Best Games (one of the most respected and sucessful developers on the XBLIG channel) even felt compelled to publicly delay going to peer review with their latest title Explosionade, which is a damned shame because it's a belter of a game.  Several high-profile sites have covered the situation with Explosionade so I won't go in to specifics, but I would like to give a little background so that people outside the community can get a better grip on what the problem is and why some of us are getting a little frustrated.

Firstly, developing for the 360 is not free.  It's not massively expensive, but in order to deploy built code to the 360 you need a Creator's Club premium membership, which costs $99 a year.  Like I say, it's not massively expensive but the fact is we are paying for a service.  A service which includes (but is not limited to) the following:
 
 * The ability to deploy both built code and packaged games to your Xbox 360 for testing
 * The ability to submit games for playtesting by other developers
 * The ability to submit games for release on the XBLIG channel, via peer review
 * Access to an extensive collection of tutorials, assets and other resources
 * Daily download and sales statistics

Not only do we have to pay (which I have no problem with), but we have to be active members of the community if we want to have a chance of getting timely reviews, assistance and be able to positively influence other developers or teams who maybe could be producing better titles.  Again I have no problem with being an active memeber of the Creator's Club Community (I've had more than my fair share of complements, thanks and benefits including an MSDN subscription) and actually I quite enjoy it. 

So here we all sit, us developers who really want to make a go of it and become jobbing indie developers, paying our bills and living our lives off the back of our own invention and skill.  We write and submit our work, test and review other developer titles, help out where we can in the forums, and generally try and spread the word that there are some great titles on the service now.  We don't really ask for much, and most of us realise that there are compications and restrictions on the XNA team which we don't and won't know about.  We're part of a wider ecosystem, and Microsoft have to balance the interests of AAA, XBLA and XBLIG developers relative to the income each generates and their importance to the XBox brand.  We're pretty low in the pecking order (some cynics would place us below the robots who flow solder the 360 motherboards) and that's understandable. 

However, for some significant time there's been a problem.  In order to better understand the problem, let's examine what happen to a game once it's passed peer review and is en route to becoming a hit or (in my case, hahaha) sinking without a trace.

On the current dashboard, the Indie Games section features a number of lists - New Releases, Top Rated, Top Downloads, Top IGN Picks and Contest Finalists.  Each of these lists contain a number of titles, and the New Releases, Top Downloads and Top Rated are automatically generated by the LIVE infrastructure.  It's like the "Top Read" lists you see on blogs or news sites.  The same infrastructure is supposed to give us daily sales and downloads stats, a day after they've happened, so that this evening I'll be able to go on-line and see how many downloads and sales my titles made yesterday.  All of this comes from the same dataset.

The Top Downloads and Top Rated are the two most important lists.  If you make it on to one or both for a couple of weeks, you could be looking at thousands - or even tens of thousands - of downloads and the average convertion rate is just over 10% (it's about 25% for the best titles).  Remebering that these lists are driven by the same dataset, along with user ratings from the dash, what would you imagine the impact to be when (not if, but when) that sales and ratings data gets spooned?

Let's say a game were to go to release on a Thursday.  That's the ideal day to get to market, because you should be on New Releases, Top Downloads and (if you've done your job right) Top Rated over the following weekend.  Let's also say that the lists hang just as the game package is being processed.  You have a list of about 50 games behind you in peer review waiting for release too, and on some days as many as 10 titles have all gone through to market.  So the game comes out, the New Releases list doesn't update, so no-one sees it, no-one downloads it, and no-one rates it.  Even if people did see it, the Top Downloads list is down too!  The weekend sales past, and in the course of 5 days another 30 or so games come out.  Your 4 months of graft, testing, tweaking, polishing, sleepless nights, time away from your family and friends has all been for nothing.  The game that you poured your heart and soul into has disappeared without a trace.  You might get lucky and have some good web reviews, but the disconnect between web publicity and dashboard sales can clearly be seen.  At best, you'll be bagging 10 or so sales a day.  For an 80-point game, after MS and the IRS take their cut, that's about $5 a day.  Yep. 5 dollars.  Compare that to 500 downloads a day for a game which goes from New Releases to Top Downloads and Top Rated within a few days.  That's closer to $245 a day, which is more reasonable if you're doing this for a living.  That's a massive difference - the kind of difference which can mean someone can pay their mortgage or not.

There have been at least 3 BIG outages of the lists so far this year - one of which went on for a week and absolutely slaughtered the sales for a number of games.  Breath Of Death was one of the few which managed to recoup some sales, but they would have done much, much better without the glitch robbing them of vital dashboard exposure.  There're also regular "hiccups" on the lists and data which, while less serious, are still an inconveniece and undermine developer confidence in the system.  So what are Microsoft doing about it?  Well...not much.  Those complaining during the big, week long outage were told basically nothing could or would be done.  It now appears that meant nothing done for individual titles OR about the basic problem, because it's still happening.

Each time the lists or sales stats get stuck, it takes one of the creators to point the problem out.  We then wait for a day or so until we get any reply, and it's always the same "Oh yea it's stuck", followed by "top agents are working on it", followed by "the data is moving again".  3 months later we go through the same thing again, developers loose out, we all get pissed off because we get no information from the XNA team on what caused the problem and if it's been fixed in any substantial or meaningful way (it hasn't been so far), and developers like Mommy's Best end up publicly saying they have so little faith in the system that they're staying away from peer review for the time being.  And who can blame them?

But the problems go deeper.  On the 4th October, a news item was posted on the XNACCO site saying that the site would be down from the 7th to the 10th for "updates".  That's 3 days notice of (possibly) 4+ days of outage.  No games will be available for peer review or playtest unless you've already downloaded them, and we've not been told why the outage has come at all, let alone why it's at such short notice.  Is it for XNA 4?  Is it just a set of cosmetic changes?  Who knows.

This all is set in the landscape of developers still shoehorning avatars in to their games, refusing to go to playtest or engage in testing or reviewing other people's work, and generally being bad eggs.  I said in a post on the XNACCO that we're supposed to police ourselves but we have no power, and we're supposed to handle our own marketing but have no control over release dates and the New/Top xxx lists are untrustworthy.  We get no assistance from the XNA team at all, and in fact opening Connect cases gets us nowhere, sending emails gets us nowhere, and posting in the forums gets us nowhere.  That's why many of us are now starting to make a noise outside of the community.

We know that there are significant improvements coming with the new Dashboard update, but will they be subject to the same problems?  Is the infrastructure being updated too?  I'd give up avatar support for a working stats system where we could actually DO SOMETHING about the problems we face or at least be informed about what causes those problems and see that someone is actually doing something.  Right now, it feels like no-one in Microsoft (outside the XNA Dev Team) is anything like on our side.  Without the XNA MVPs the site would have ground to a halt more than a year ago.  Even if MS don't think us devs are worth support, at least don't crap on your MVPs.

If (when) Apple behave in a way of which developers disapprove, there's one hell of a stink.  Why and how are MS able to get away with such nonsense?  The vocal and widespread criticism of the system has prompted no reply from them.  The person who was the "public face" of the CCO team has, apparently, left the team and no-one seems to know who's filling that role now.

I honestly dislike going outside the community to complain.  I'd much rather engage in a reasoned, (slightly more) private discussion about the problems that we as developers and the service in general face.  Sadly, Microsoft clearly don't agree.

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