Indie Devs Unhappy With Xbox Live Dashboard Update

[Andy Chalk]

Indie Devs Unhappy With Xbox Live Dashboard Update

A number of indie game developers are unhappy about the new Xbox Live dashboard, saying it makes indie releases unnecessarily difficult to access.

Guess how many button presses it takes to get from the home screen to the Indie Game Top Downloads on the new Xbox Live dashboard. Go on, guess. Four? Five? Nine? Try 17, according to a post on a Microsoft developer forum [http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/96332.aspx?PageIndex=1], which also pointed out that it only takes eight button presses to get to the Arcade and Games on Demand sections.

That's not the only complaint. The Indie Games section is now "one big fat list" that pages instead of scrolls and apparently there are very few filtering options and no way to break them down by genre. As you might imagine, this isn't going over very well with some indie devs.

"This is just a giant F-U to all of us. There is simply no other way to put it," wrote Pouncing Kitten Games. "Put 2000+ games in a single list and give less than a half dozen filtering options, not including genre? Good call. Whoever made that decision should be fired immediately."

Naturally, comparisons are also being made to to last year's dashboard update, which also left indie devs feeling angry and abused. "We have seen exactly what happens when indie games were made more difficult to find/get to in the last dashboard update," wrote Neil Jones, the creator of Monster Talk. "Everyone knows the top downloads list is where the good money was made, if you landed high enough you could have sales for a few weeks if not months. If people cant get to this list easily then things don't look good."

But some posters are counseling patience until post-update sales numbers can be collected for comparison and Microsoft's Nick Gravelyn said he's keeping an eye on the thread and "gathering up feedback," presumably to help determine whether the system is as much of a mess as some people are saying and, if so, how to correct it.

Any XBL Indie fans here who've done much with the update? Do you see much of a functional difference or greater difficulty in access games, or is it more a matter of people complaining not because it's necessarily worse, but just because it's different?

via: Develop [http://www.develop-online.net/news/39322/Indie-anger-at-new-Xbox-dash]


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[Mrsoupcup]

The update feels more like a way to force us to see adds, and shovel the kinect down our throat.

Nothing was wrong with the previous Dashboard, why they felt to change it rather than add to it is way beyond me. And yes the indie games tab is a complete mess.

 

[imnot]

I still have the old dashboard, U MAD MICROSOFT?

The update feels more like a way to force us to see adds, and shovel the kinect down our throat.

Nothing was wrong with the previous Dashboard, why they felt to change it rather than add to it is way beyond me. And yes the indie games tab is a complete mess.

This is what it sounded like it would be.

 

[robert01]

LOL it takes 8 presses to get to the XBLA menu. It's a game console it should take 3 at the most. All the other media shit should take more, Microsoft just wanted to turn their console into an advertising machine.

 

[CoL0sS]

I don't have 360, but I can agree that this is a giant slap to the face. Browsing through menus is one of the things that I personally hate to do. It's tedious, boring and off-putting. I can understand how indie devs are pissed because something like this threatens their very existence. If people have to spend few minutes browsing for a game they can't remember they'll eventually give up. Leaves a bitter taste, especially when you see how much space was reserved for ads.

 

[Denamic]

Not only that, they also do not even honor their contracts with indie devs.
Like with Super Meat Boy.

 

[Epona]

So with this update, has the 360 come closer to being the Wii?

You know with the Wii there is a classic controller but the system isn't designed around it. Isn't that the case now with the 360?

 

[McMullen]

I haven't connected to XBOX Live since before the update was released. Is it possible to not install the new dashboard and keep using Live?

 

[Scars Unseen]

Oh come on Indie developers, they all that extra room for add space.

The update feels more like a way to force us to see adds, and shovel the kinect down our throat.

Dam it!

Hold on, let me call the boys... Yes. We can do that.

 

[orangeapples]

Just wait until the next update where it will take 53 user inputs to find the Indie games, and it will be entirely Kinect controlled. And when you find them they will be organized on a roulette wheel where you will randomly land on an indie game. Then once the system has picked the game the description will only show every other word and no obvious option to buy. To buy the game you will have to do a handstand for 10 seconds while doing bicycle kicks in the air. That will take you to the confirmation page. To confirm you will have to spin counterclockwise 14 times. Any more or any less will cancel the process and take you back to the home page.

 

[Micalas]

Just wait until the next update where it will take 53 user inputs to find the Indie games, and it will be entirely Kinect controlled. And when you find them they will be organized on a roulette wheel where you will randomly land on an indie game. Then once the system has picked the game the description will only show every other word and no obvious option to buy. To buy the game you will have to do a handstand for 10 seconds while doing bicycle kicks in the air. That will take you to the confirmation page. To confirm you will have to spin counterclockwise 14 times. Any more or any less will cancel the process and take you back to the home page.

Your avatar goes very well with the process you just explained.

 

[LostCrusader]

I haven't connected to XBOX Live since before the update was released. Is it possible to not install the new dashboard and keep using Live?

I'm fairly sure you can't connect at all without the update. I truly despise this update so please let me know if you find anyway to go back.

 

[mjc0961]

17? Let's test that.

1. LB to social
2. LB to video.
3. LB to games.
4. Down to Game Marketplace.
5. A to open Game Marketplace.
6. LB to games.
7-9. Right 3 times to game type.
10-11. Right 2 times to indie games (which is a freaking HUGE panel, BTW. it's not one of those tiny ones).
12. A to open Indie games.

12, not 17. And that's not bad considering it's not really hidden all that much. It was in the exact place I expected to find it.

Yes, the filtering options could be much, MUCH better, but stop whining (and exaggerating) about how many button presses it takes to get there.

 

[Throwitawaynow]

Have indie devs ever been happy?

 

[Harker067]

At first I honestly thought they just got rid of the indie section cause I couldn't find it anywhere. I second those that truly despise this update. It's a bloated ugly mess of ads and promotions and marketing.

2 Thumbs down microsoft.

 

[Roander]

It's harder to get to the indie games. This is what we're choosing to be upset about? Not the class action waiver you now have to agree to to even connect to xbox live? The one in section 18 at the bottom of the contract? The one that takes over two minutes (timed) of holding down on the controller to get to? I know that clause is becoming a common thing but it seems to me that that's even more reason to complain about it.

 

[Hiroshi Mishima]

Yes, the filtering options could be much, MUCH better, but stop whining (and exaggerating) about how many button presses it takes to get there.

I seem to recall seeing you making excuses for Microsoft in a couple of other threads recently. Funny that.


Anyways, I find the whole new Dashboard (just updated) to be quite unsatisfying. It feels cluttered and disorganized (from a user standpoint). I am still disappointed they've not allowed us to disable channels like we could with the "Welcome" tab in the previous dashboard. I do not use Music, Apps, Bing, Video.. I wouldn't use Social, either, if they'd left the Profiles where they were on the Home Screen.

For that matter, while I was browsing the news here I'd left the Xbox on idle, and had my curser on the big stupid ad in the Home tab so it wouldn't keep moving.. after a while (a good 10+ minutes after my controller turned off) I heard a weird sound and suddenly my curser'd been kicked to another box so that the ads could start scrolling again. THAT pissed me off.


Lemme ramble a bit and talk about the Wii. The Wii has a variety of channels you can customize for News, Weather, Internet, etc... guess what? You can move these around so that anything you do not like can be deleted and re-added later, likewise you can also move unused (but not unwanted) channels to the far right of the full channel allotment. This means you don't have to see them.

Xbox 360 has a lot of "tabs" and other content which, personally, I find wholly redundant to my needs as a gamer. I do not interact with other people save my cousin, and that's almost exclusively via his own Xbox when we game together at his house. I do not watch videos or listen to music via my Xbox, cause my PC can do all of that for me and it's just a turn of my chair/a few mouse clicks away. Neither do I use Kinect, nor will I ever; to quote VGCats' one comic, "No, I've already got a Wii."

So, on the whole, not only is the new dashboard bloated and unhelpful, it's also fairly obsolete. The previous Dashboard, while still stubbornly forcing me to view the "My Xbox" page I didn't ask for, at least had things laid out in a much more intuitive way. So yes, I agree with the Indie Devs, the sorting options are quite poor, and "related" is just as pointless as ever. I checked out some random Indie game once I actually found the damn section, and it had Saw and Kinectimals as related games, despite the game I'd been looking being in neither genre, nor having similar content.