World of Goo Creator: "XBLA's Health Is Actually Flagging"

[Kopikatsu]

What's a MGS and TCR?

MGS is Microsoft Game Studios. TCR is something something requirement.

From the context, it sounds like Microsoft won't allow patches that are below a certain size so developers have to put off patching their games until they have a ton of junk to update. Not sure, though.

 

[lacktheknack]

Uh, what does that graph actually say? I can't actually tell, from the looks of it, Sony plans to have higher numbers than Microsoft in 2012, but I don't know what the numbers mean or represent!

It's in the blog post. It's "Number of Indie Developers for each Platform", numbers are exact value.

Note that 2D Boy did the charts and data-gathering themselves, so take it with a grain of salt (2D Boy are).

 

[-Dragmire-]

What's a MGS and TCR?

MGS is Microsoft Game Studios. TCR is something something requirement.

From the context, it sounds like Microsoft won't allow patches that are below a certain size so developers have to put off patching their games until they have a ton of junk to update. Not sure, though.

Ah, thanks.

Seems odd to have a minimum size requirement when a game needs a quick fix.

____________________________________

Dev: Crap! A glitch disabled the fire button!
MS: Fix it when you make a map pack.
Dev: But... people can't play...
MS: Thems the rules.

____________________________________

 

[Kopikatsu]

Seems odd to have a minimum size requirement when a game needs a quick fix.

Well...that would be the point in complaining about it, right?

Besides, it's more ridiculous that Microsoft doesn't allow free patches/DLC. If the customers aren't paying for it, then the developers are. It's unreasonable. It's also why Team Fortress 2 on the 360 doesn't get patches. VALVe didn't want to deal with them anymore.

 

[Iron Mal]

I personally think it's quite strange that lately we've had a lot of articles which have been titled '[insert developer of well known game] thinks this about the industy!', we never hear 'James Cameron thinks that modern audiences are losing attention span' or 'Steven King thinks largest genre today is horror' or any other acclaimed individual from another medium spout their predictions about their respective industry so why have we been seeing this quite a lot with gaming recently?

There are many game creators and developers out there who I'm sure are very creative and intelligent people (and the quality of their works speaks for itself) but just as I wouldn't place much stock in what Ridley Scott has to say about the film industry at large I'm not exactly sure why hearing that 'the creator of World of Goo came out and said this' is supposed to make it any more valid or pertinent.

If facts, statistics or analysis suggest a trend then fine, but in that case it shouldn't need the backing of some dignitary of gaming.

This just seemed a bit weird to me.

 

[Iron Mal]

Ah, thanks.

Seems odd to have a minimum size requirement when a game needs a quick fix.

____________________________________

Dev: Crap! A glitch disabled the fire button!
MS: Fix it when you make a map pack.
Dev: But... people can't play...
MS: Thems the rules.

____________________________________

Sorry for the double post but that's not really that odd a requirement.

It may seem inconveinient for indie developers to have to make their patches bigger but at the same time it would probably be just as much of a hassle for Microsoft to have to put up several smaller updates and patches than it would be for them to wait until they get one bigger one together to put up (picture it as being like being asked to carry a bag of laundry upstairs and electing to do so one article of clothing at a time as it comes out of the dryer rather than just waiting for the whole load and taking it together).

It may not make sense to you but there is method to their madness.

 

[-Dragmire-]

Ah, thanks.

Seems odd to have a minimum size requirement when a game needs a quick fix.

____________________________________

Dev: Crap! A glitch disabled the fire button!
MS: Fix it when you make a map pack.
Dev: But... people can't play...
MS: Thems the rules.

____________________________________

Sorry for the double post but that's not really that odd a requirement.

It may seem inconveinient for indie developers to have to make their patches bigger but at the same time it would probably be just as much of a hassle for Microsoft to have to put up several smaller updates and patches than it would be for them to wait until they get one bigger one together to put up (picture it as being like being asked to carry a bag of laundry upstairs and electing to do so one article of clothing at a time as it comes out of the dryer rather than just waiting for the whole load and taking it together).

It may not make sense to you but there is method to their madness.

I suppose so... I was equating it more to a mass email with attachments to a ton of people, the smaller the attachments are the easier it is to send to all those people. Even if it's done more often I figured the smaller size would put less strain on the network.

 

[Iron Mal]

I suppose so... I was equating it more to a mass email with attachments to a ton of people, the smaller the attachments are the easier it is to send to all those people. Even if it's done more often I figured the smaller size would put less strain on the network.

From a netwroking standpoint that makes sense if you're working with one person but remember that there are literally thousands of games that need to have their updates sorted and placed on whatever service or system is used to send updates to players and also that they have to consider what their players will think.

I can say from personal experience that I'd rather be waiting on one large download to finish than several smaller ones (less of a frustration factor knowing there's less to get out of the way) and considering how I'm way more patient than most people I know I can safely say that the approach of getting more done in fewer updates is definately the way to go.

 

[Lukeydoodly]

...He also argues that the current Xbox Live layout does not make it readily apparent how or where users game buy games.

Is that a joke?

 

[tk1989]

Havent developers been having problems with Microsoft's XBLA system for a while now? This isn't anything new

 

[GeorgW]

I've always been dumbfounded by why devs even bother with XBLA when there are so many other, better services out there.
If M$ don't step up with their next console they're gonna lose the biggest growing part of the industry.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Ah, thanks.

Seems odd to have a minimum size requirement when a game needs a quick fix.

____________________________________

Dev: Crap! A glitch disabled the fire button!
MS: Fix it when you make a map pack.
Dev: But... people can't play...
MS: Thems the rules.

____________________________________

Sorry for the double post but that's not really that odd a requirement.

It may seem inconveinient for indie developers to have to make their patches bigger but at the same time it would probably be just as much of a hassle for Microsoft to have to put up several smaller updates and patches than it would be for them to wait until they get one bigger one together to put up (picture it as being like being asked to carry a bag of laundry upstairs and electing to do so one article of clothing at a time as it comes out of the dryer rather than just waiting for the whole load and taking it together).

It may not make sense to you but there is method to their madness.

Having become more of a PC gamer in the past few years than I used to be, I can only say that based on my own experience it's both an odd and terrible requirement. The games that have the absolute best support are consistently the ones that have patches pushed out immediately whenever there's a problem.

If there's a big patch/update a few months after the previous one, that's fine if there haven't been any problems in the meantime, but it's really nice when the devs have the ability to push out a small patch to fix a bug or a glitch two hours after it's discovered without having to wait a month for it to go through some endless bureaucratic QA process when all they did was fix a single typo in a config file somewhere. After getting used to "anytime updates" with a lot of the games I play, dealing with the ones that are stuck on painfully slow release cycles just sucks, whether they're console or PC games.

It's not like it's even much work on their end if they get rid of the internal licensing/testing step that MS does and only worry about distribution like the article is proposing. In that case, like already happens on Steam and Apple's App Store and so on, the devs just upload the files, and most of the rest is handled automatically. Sure, you're carrying the laundry upstairs one article of clothing at a time, but you have a robot to do it for you while you go do something useful/important instead, so it doesn't really matter.