Microsoft Live Royalties
February 22nd, 2008Well, if this is true, it seems like a terrible move on Microsoft’s part. Kotaku reports that MS has decided to cut the royalties that it pays to indie developers in half, from 70% to 35%; the rationale for this move is unclear, but might be related to a push to use the XNA package for future development.
This seems like a bad idea for two reasons, 1 practical and 1 theoretical. From the latter standpoint, it’s unclear to me why Microsoft deserves to earn a 65% cut of revenues when it provides no actual content development - its role is purely distribution and QC (both of which are traditionally low-margin businesses, since they’re not responsible for actually creating anything). And from a practical standpoint, XBox Live derives most of its advantages - absolute and relative to the PS3 - from having lots of exclusive content, not from its interface or style. If the PlayStation network had great games and a lousy appearance, we’d still use it.
This move is clearly going to discourage many developers from continuing to stay with the Live network, and to the extent that it hurts creative content development, is dangerously close to ceding ground to Sony. We all saw what happened when Sony’s hubris led it to disregard its consumers’ needs and create an expensive product without enough content. I would caution Microsoft to be careful about doing the same.
This is still just an unconfirmed rumor, but Microsoft’s response is hardly encouraging. Good job to Kotaku for investigating this.
Posted in Business, Geoff, Microsoft, Xbox Live |
February 23rd, 2008 at 12:01 am
1. This is why, altho I love DD [digital distribution], you have got to be skeptical of the exploitations done by publishers and hardware manufacturers.
2. Speaking of DD, have you heard what NIntendo is doing with theirs? It’s a fucking shame, and a fucking insult. I wonder how RMC and the Gonintendo crew are handling it? Are they defending Nintendo or criticizing it? I’ve stopped visiting them because of their sheer cluelessness, so If one of you two could tell me…
February 23rd, 2008 at 12:13 am
Do you mean the possibility of fee-based online play? I’d criticize it, but Nintendo’s so clueless about online already that I’m not sure it would do much good. Needless to say, when you don’t have a viable product to begin with, deciding to charge for it is never a great idea. Especially when you’re trying to change the industry standard of free online.
February 23rd, 2008 at 12:17 am
(By the way, I haven’t seen Gonintendo address the topic at all yet.)
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:28 am
ha that’s not even the end of it.
have you heard that instead of allowing play from SD cards or allowing HDD, they are adressing Wii storage problems by a process that can be described as zipping and unzipping?? quote from game life:
“Aoyama then addressed how Nintendo is dealing with a hot topic: Storage limitations.
They’ll compress the games and then expand them when you start playing them. “This step should help alleviate the problem with size limitations.”
Apparently the manuals for the game will also be stored online-only, not inside the game ROM itself.”
….are they fucking idiots? pwahahahahahahahaha …this aint the 1980s, ninty!
god im still laffing
February 24th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I asked an XBLA dev I know about this. He said he couldn’t talk about contract details due to NDAs, but that his company was looking at alternatives like PSN. I think that’s pretty close to confirmation.