If there is one thing that has carried the independent game development culture to its impact in today’s game space, it’s the pure passion that lies behind each and every indie creation, from the complete failures that we quickly forget to the marvelous pieces we’ve seen in the likes of Braid, World of Goo and Minecraft. And by now, many companies have learned to leverage this strong (and free) platform of passion to their own advantage, most prominently Apple and their successful App Store.
The collective power of the indie game community was also recognized by Microsoft, initially through the release of their somewhat successful XNA Game Studio Express development suite. The easy-to-use tools for creating a relatively complex game quickly garnered traction, while having suffered loses to even more user-friendly development environments like Unity lately. But the ability to compile games for a console for the first time created a strong interest, and with the release of the Xbox Live Community Games service in late 2008, Microsoft hoped to establish an App Store similar for games on the Xbox 360.
More than 2 years have gone by, and it’s hard to say that the service, now called Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG), has created the success that both Microsoft and aspiring indie developers had hoped for. The service can still only be accessed from a limited range of countries, the marketplace is well hidden within the Xbox 360 dashboard and the games are often overshadowed by the bigger, fancier and more promoted Xbox Live Arcade titles. Recently, many developers have begun reconsidering XBLIG as their platform of choice, even despite the well-made toolset XNA offers.
This can really come as little surprise in the light of Microsoft’s efforts on the matter. In reality, Microsoft have shown little enthusiasm for the service on anything but a shallow level. While the intentions might have been good, the actual willingness to push forward an valuable indie marketplace has seemed rather lackluster. Much like Nintendo and their WiiWare, it has been released and abandoned with a mentality of “they will figure it out themselves”.
While this is not a far-fetched strategy for a market that is used to do everything itself, one must consider the implications of a sit-back-and-watch strategy on a rather narrow and closed platform. Microsoft have a big say in the visibility and features of the XBLIG titles, still lacking Achievements integration, search functions in the interface, international outreach, easy sharing and promotion opportunities and much more. Despite the best of intentions of developers, they find it difficult to create an attractive and even sufficient revenue stream, forcing them to new pastures.
While lead users are often capable of and willing to innovate on their own, it is a strict requirement that freedom of innovation is enabled. This requires open environments and full sharing, as well as a tight and rapid feedback and development process, where the company and the lead users can innovate collaboratively and rapidly. But XBLIG has remained a rather enclosed service within Microsoft, taking little input from its lead users and allowing little freedom to innovate outside the set perimeters that is the actual games.
If Microsoft truly want XBLIG to blossom, it must let it rise to a level where it can actually compete with the Xbox Live Arcade game. While this may create an internal fear of service cannibalism within Microsoft, it should only be because it displays that these two services should be unified to create one, shared digital distribution interface, where everyone has access. And it must allow that indie developers have access to all the same tools and features that do professional developers, such as Achievements, special promotions and so forth. And even better, they should open the development of their development tools and services to the lead users, who can help shape an even better marketplace, interface, distribution and promotion strategy for tomorrow.
If one wish to harness the truly great and relatively cheap power of the indie game community, one must learn that it requires true passion, true commitment and true collaboration. These are people who are pouring hours upon hours of their free time into products that could eventually turn one’s own product or service into the dominant factor of the market, and they must be treated with the same heart that they develop games with. Anything else is hypocritical and bound to fail.