Schafer: Indies Moving Away From XBLA, Patches Cost $40,000

WOW! Just WOW! Do they REALLY have THAT much control over at MS? I simply do not believe it would cost MS 40k just to put up a patch for a game.

Wasn't is also XBOX Live that forced developers to charge for DLC they planned to give away for free, so Microdoft could take their cut?

I have heard about microsoft sucking more money out of indie devs compared to PC/Steam services, but this sounds ridiculous.

Holy crumpets! That's ridiculous.

What the actual ...?

I don't think that this is true, Microsoft was always indie friendly company and still is. Back in original Xbox days you would get Indie games on XBL at that time PS2 has seen nothing like that only few home-brews all you had to do is do a presentation of your indie game and Microsoft would get 30% profit. Charging for DLC is not Microsoft's idea it just involved like that even in RETRO days on pc you want game addons ? you buy them same goes until this day, Patch is always free you wouldn't see many addons for pc until Xbox 360 and PS3 came out.

From what I've heard XBLA is really not friendly towards indie at all. But hey they don't have to be, they have such a huge chunk of the market that devs HAVE to jump through hoops and BS to get on there whether they like it or not.

40k? This is outrageus

Gosh. This is just no comment.

Yeah, I've heard before XBLA sucks for indie developers.

You just have to see positive. It means there will be more indie games for PC(not just ported to PC) and that is a good thing.

new indies always welcome on steam :)

It's not just Microsoft, all consoles do the same thing. Consoles really do need to change dramatically or just go away completely for the better of the industry.

this is true. come to steam or self publish! we will welcome them with open wallets!

It costs $40,000 to put up a fucking patch! Oh my gosh

That is so fucking insane

Microsofts policy for patches is quite strange. Even Valve had a lot of trouble with it (TeamFortress 2 died on the consoles and they had to fight hard to get free L4D DLCs). My guess is that Microsoft wants to stop the way games are produced for the XBox. On PC there have been to many games that were released in what others call a beta. That's not so cool for consoles.

It costs $400,000 to patch XBLA games for twelve seconds.

In all honesty it's not that surprising coming from a company that charges users of it's online matchmaking and friendlist service annually whilst also advertising on the same service.

Microsoft seems to be racing with Capcom, EA, Ubisoft and Activision for the title of Most Hated publisher/developer in history.

Wait WHAT? OH SHI- o_O

I'm curious how this compares with XBLIG.

Well, on the plus side: this may mean that Castle Crashers 2 (if it ever ends up happening, a guy can dream) will be for PC and therefore have free online multiplayer.

You know I'm not surprised actually. I'm just not. After all what Microsoft has done it's just not surprising. Meanwhile Steam offers their services free to publishers/indies and the users. I can see why Schafer said he loved Steam in at kickstarter