Indie developers feel shortchanged, buried by new dashboard

[fluffymoochicken]

The new Xbox 360 dashboard is clean. It's very white. It's also got a lot of indie developers for the platform upset with Microsoft, accusing the platform holder of putting their baby in the corner.

Xbox Live Indie Games used to be somewhat easily found in the "Games Marketplace" section of the dashboard. Now? They've been removed from the Games Marketplace, and shunted into an area called "specialty shops", which includes...the Avatar Marketplace and the Game Room.

That's certainly not an area you'd visit looking for games, and the developers who have provided games for the service are justifiably miffed.

Here's a selection of quotes from the indie developers forum:

   "Sad to see, but not unexpected given the direction of the platform for the past several months"

   "So pretty much all the worst suppositions since AppHub came in to being have turned out to be right. The XBLA studios wouldn't put up with XBLIG on the same screenspace, MS want us all to swallow their **** and move over to get ****ed as WP7 developers - who will updoubtably be treated in the same shoddy, half-baked way as we have when the project fails - which MS mobile offerings always, ALWAYS do."

   "I'm actually surprised we didn't end up worse than we did. At least we are 2nd on specialties and next to the Avatar store and not the the 12th tab on the specialty shop behind the various music shops (although that may change in a month when the music shops complain)."

"Looks like all the Devs who made XBLIG apps had it right all the time, and we "Game" developers were the ones who had it wrong. As the new dashboard clearly shows, Microsoft does no longer consider XBLIGs to be "Games" (at least not "Games" enough to merit a place in the "Games & Demos" section).

    So please stand with me in a minute of silence to mourn the passing away of Xbox LIVE Indie Games."

I'd take some video or screens of my own, but you know, Xbox Live Indie Games isn't available in Australia, which gives you yet another indication of how seriously Microsoft takes this venture.

http://kotaku.com/5679096/indie-devs-no ... -dashboard

And here's the original thread where developers are discussing how their games have been buried:

http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/64686.aspx

[Sega Uranus]

I do think it should be the first option on the specialty shop (which is right below the Games & Demos section I think), but people are overreacting. We have no solid evidence that this change has effected sales in a negative way. People who buy these kind of games are already aware the section exists.

If Microsoft goes out of their way to hide these, I would understand. The incredibly large majority are barely even playable, let alone worth buying. Of course there are some really cool games in these, but the majority are like this

[youtube:ts6wfwl9]txV-KzfSPrw[/youtube:ts6wfwl9]