Braid Developer Jonathon Blow - Steam Way Ahead of Xbox Live Arcade

[Hectic Glenn]

At GDC this year, Jonathon Blow presented his new title The Witness. The new game will be much longer than his previous title, Braid, with a higher price point than other indie titles you may find on XBLA.

“If I go to Steam I can sell a game for $25, but if I go to Xbox Live Arcade I can’t. In fact, the contract says I can’t control the price at all. That artificial channeling is sort of making their platform inhospitable for certain kinds of games.”

Blow's experience with visiting and working with Valve are far more positive, including their approach to helping developers.

“The engineers who type the code of the website to make it happen were there, and we were there, and we asked if it would be feasible to do something, and they wrote it down and put it down on their to-do list. It’s the complete opposite of the Microsoft bureaucracy, which is ‘we can’t do that, it’s not how the Xbox works.’ That’s their standard answer.”

Despite Microsoft's problems, he acknowledges they're still doing the best in the console market in this area, but "They’re still aiming for where Steam was, they’re not skating to where the puck is going to be". Penny Arcade.

 

[ríomhaire]

TBH I wish Valve made a light-weight version of the Steam client that only had the bare-minimum required features to run and update the games. I'm not sure why I'd want that, but something tells me it should exist.