Blow: 'Unnecessary' XBLA Hurdles Hurt Game Quality Options

[Xbox-Scene]

Blow: 'Unnecessary' XBLA Hurdles Hurt Game Quality Posted by XanTium | August 8 12:35 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From gamasutra.com: [QUOTE] Independent designer Jonathan Blow's award-winning Braid made its Xbox Live Arcade debut just last week, but Blow says Microsoft's certification requirements might have impeded the game's final quality. "They removed some of the requirements for XBLA games, but there are still a lot of requirements, and I believe that, at least for a single-player game like my game, the vast majority of these requirements are unnecessary," he says. "I put in a tremendous amount of work meeting all these requirements, when I could have put that work into the actual game, and made it even a little more polished, little bit better." Blow says Microsoft's XBLA certification process is intended to ensure a standard of quality for all titles on the service -- "But I feel like it actually decreases the quality of games, because people spend so much of their energy on these things that users don't even really care about." [/QUOTE] Full Story: gamasutra.com

[HotKnife420]

Read the full story and he doesn't really say what kind of requirements these gamers 'wouldn't care about'.

[AcidPenguiN]

It really comes off as Blow being sort of a diva.

[Tiptup300]

He didn't even follow the guideline to where there is a "Press start" screen that chooses which controller the game should use. I usually leave my guitar plugged in all the time so I hate having to restart my entire 360 just to play his game.

[twistedsymphony]

first comment in the article by Jonathan Blow himself:

Hmm, this makes me seem extremely negative toward Microsoft, when that's really not how it is. Yes, there were some negative interactions during development, but they were also cool about a lot of things.

They didn't try to dictate the game design, as many publishers might -- they were very hands-off there, and what is in the final game is exactly what I wanted to put there. They also bent a lot of XBLA rules, in order to help me make the game the way I wanted, which was pretty cool of them. (For example, the way in which you can launch Braid and be directly in the game -- that is technically illegal if you go by the book, but they saw what I was trying to do and went with it.)

So I just want to add some balance here. For the most part working with Microsoft has been great. There have been occasional problems, including one that I was very upset about -- but there are people at Microsoft who really got the game and worked very hard to help bring it to completion, and it would just be wrong to slight their contribution with some kind of blanket "Microsoft = Bad" attitude.

F-ing media slant...

It would have been nice if he mentioned more about what requirements he was referring to exactly. Though I'm sure that was cut out of the interview for being too worthwhile... we couldn't have that.

[jdsony]

It really comes off as Blow being sort of a diva.

Yeah god forbid a developer have an opinion. Seems they get slammed any time they stand up for themselves. Imagine that was the attitude with everything? Anytime anyone had a problem they were just called a whiner. What an awesome place to live.

[dhotull]

Yeah, that's what happens on the official xbox forums/circle****.

[t0m]

if i went to high school with that guy i would have called him 'blow-j'...

[bucko]

I don't think it's XBLA it's more the quality of the games, most of them are naff and you can find many flash equivalents free on the Internet. I've only bought like 3 Arcade games and have the free ones, got all the demos but most the demos suck, I mean all them 800 points can go to a decent disk title. I really don't see much point in Arcade. For example GW2 arcade demo for me was pretty pants, GW will do fine for me. RezHD is still the best Arcade game imho even though it is a remake of the DC version.

[twistedsymphony]

There are a few things that keep me from spending 800+ points on an XBLA game

1. I can get a full retail game used at the store for $10-$20 it offers five times as much replayability. Not to mention most of the "remake" games on the XBLA are games I already own on another system and if I didn't could buy them cheaper elsewhere... games like Rez are an exception since their cost on other systems is astronomical.

2. When I'm done with one of the similarly priced store bought games I can sell it back to the store, or on eBay, or somewhere else and get some of that money back... once I've bought an XBLA game I can't resell it, I can't trade it with someone else, or anything like that.

3. The price of XBLA games never drops... There are probably about 3 dozen games where I've said, "this is ok, I'd buy it at 400 but not at 800" But guess what... the price stays at 800 until the end of time apparently. Sure they've dropped the prices on a few games but really they need to do that to all games across the board, if it's been out for 2 years it's time to drop the f-ing price. If you've released a sequel, it's time to drop the price. There's no reason Mutant Storm Reloaded, a game that launched with the console and had a sequel released nearly a year ago, should still be full price... that's just retarded.