Well, like a bunch of southwestern hippies lolling around in a 'Frisco park smoking dope and swapping tales of their dreams, hundreds of developers are at GDC this week.  Not only that but our dear MVP friends are at their annual summit.  If we're lucky, something nice for us XBLIGers might be announced at the MVP summit - I know not what, but there's usually something at least to whet the appitite - or GDC.  But for me at least, time is starting to run very short for the XBLIG "project".  This has very little to do with my own sales directly but is an opinion informed by the hard work of dozens, possibly hundredsof dedicated, skilled, imaginative developers going unrewarded, unheralded and largely unsupported by Microsoft.  With other release channels coming in to view such as the delicious IndieCity, the increasing popularity of STEAM and easier to use tools for developers to release for themselves, what exactly does XBLIG have which could possibly offset the hassle, disappointment and consistent failure that is Xbox LIVE Indie Games?

Well, honestly, not much of any real measureable benefit.  Even the cudos of being able to say "I have 5 games published on Xbox LIVE" is jaded and tarnished now.  The Xbox hardware is pretty much out of date now - I've just build a new PC for about £250 which pisses all over the 360 even with a built-in Intel video card.  We're limited to small distro sizes, hamstrung on pricing, have no ability to produce social games (true MMOs for example, or storing user data on external databases, or integrating with facebook or even twitter) and while we get excellent support from the MVPs on the AppHub website and the team who actually make the XNA Framework it's become crystal clear that Microsoft are simply not interested in committing resource to XBLIG.  We're still not getting ratings on the dash thanks to the way MS changed the layout, sales reports are still very prone to crashing and even gving obviously false data, payment is slow and unpredictable, and the only frequent publicity for our work comes with the Dream Build Play competition.  And that's without even thinking about all the problems with Windows Phone 7 submission and publication.

We've all been vocal about these problems for literally years now.  After the dash debacle last year a token effort was made by MS to ask us what we'd like but really nothing at all has changed.  THe AppHub website still has crappy formatting and is still throwing posts away at random (and it always feels like the longer the post the more likely it is to blow cookies), but really all the technical problems are only a symptom of what's going on.  Since the get-go when the channel launched as Community Games it's been more or less impossible to get any kind of consistant service from Microsoft.  This is the absolute crux of the problem and for me is very hard to understand.  Why the hell would you go the trouble of producing a framework, making a CLR for the 360 and rolling it out to millions of units worldwide, building a website and all the playtest/peer review processed, all the educational content and roping in MVPs to support the technology and community, and then leave it to wither on the vine?

Frustratingly, the community seems now to be fragmenting even more than usual, with the crap-machines turning out as many games as ever and not taking an interest in the wider XBLIG ecosystem while committed, skilled developers are pushed aside.  Of course one could argue that the customer buys what the customer wants and of course that's true, but the "democratisation" of game development has devalued the Xbox brand an no-one seriously expects to find "tomorrows hit today" on XBLIG.  Dream Build Play 2011 is now open for registration and this is the last refuge for quality games which are destined for release to the channel.  I'm still not sure if I'm going to enter YoYoYo, partly because a platformer won last year but mainly because I just think it's a cheat.  Rather than foster high-quality development habits all year round, MS seem to be using the channel as a loss-leader and hoping that DBP produces a hit which can be ported to XBLA.  To me, this is an arsish way to go about it.  There's a prize pool of $75,000 and if that was used for on-dash promotion then we'd all win - channel visits up, sales up, MS' cut up.  Right now I'm left feeling like a human rights activist trying to work out why a foreign power invaded another country - it all seems incomprehensible, we have no visibility of the management position or even structure, we get rebuffed at best and ignored the rest of the time.  DBP always shifts the focus of the community and does strange things to the release flow, disctracting us from a lot of the workaday problems with the channel so in a way, I fell that on principle I shouldn't go in for it.  What's the point?  MS can't run the channel the rest of the year, why should we have any confidence in the way DBP is managed? 

So, where does all that leave MStar Games?  Well, right now it's looking like YoYoYo will be our last XBLIG for the moment.  I've been working on Windows versions of 3 of our games (SPfT, BBXE and Xenocide) and frankly, the wider featureset available to Windows games far far outweigh the notional benefits of publishing for the XBox.  I can add MySql connections for highscores and other functions, I have no intrinsic limit on package size, I have a range of distribution and marketing options which don't suffer a web-sale disconnect like the 360 dash does, and I won't be depending on a clearly crap set of processes to get sales stats.  But above all, releif from the piss-poor attitude of Microsoft mean that rather than tacking x86 builds on to a project I'll probably bolt 360 functions in to Windows games form now on.  The only thing which may change this plan is if there's some great announcement at either GDC or the MVP summit (and we're unlikely to hear immediately about anything from the MVP summit) which indicates that MS are going to raise their game and start doing what they should.  I've said it dozens of times, but it stands repition : we actually payfor this shit.  And I'm pretty much done with it.  Frankly I'd be a liar if I said the last 3 or so years of writing XBLIGs has been a joy because it hasn't.  It's not been profitable, it's got harder and harder to get motivated because of the way MS run the show, and nothing I can see makes me think this is going to change any time soon.  I've loved the actual production, I've loved being a part of the community and I've loved spending what little cash I've made but as Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is one of the definitions of madness.  Time for the madness to stop.

[EDIT] Having just finished writing this I popped over to the AppHub forums and it seems that now dash ratings are busted.  Games released after 21st Feb has any ratings, including the top selling new releases.  One more nail in the coffin...[/EDIT]

[EDIT 2]Having seen some tweets which concerned me I think it's only fair to point out that XBLIG is NOT the same thing as XNA.  We use the XNA framework to write XBLIGs, but you can also prduce games for Windows and Windows Phone 7 using XNA.  And best of all - XNA it's self is FREE and you can download the developer tools (Visual Studio 2010 Express) for $0.00 and get to grips with game writing without a penny peice to pay!  If you want to learn, go to create.msdn.com and have a root around for the download link.  Remeber - development is FREE, it's DEPLOYING and PUBLISHING to the 360 or WP7 which costs money.[/EDIT 2]

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