XBLA, Steam and PSN Vital to Indie Developers

[Scizophrenic Llama]

I can agree with this, Minecraft is being used as an example against this, but a good surge of traffic did occur when Valve promoted the game in one of their blog posts on Steam. Make of that what you will.

It wouldn't be impossible, but it'd be pretty damn hard for them to get the amount of attention they do otherwise. Cthulu Saves the World probably wouldn't exist on the PC format had it not had some decent exposure via XBLA's indie section(would've done far better had it just been in the arcade section though), and now that it's made it to Steam it has sold even better because of the front page coverage it got.

Then there is a whole other territory with app stores for mobile gaming. Angry Birds speaks for itself at this point.

 

[Drasvin]

I feel I should play Devil's Advocate for that last quote (not that I agree with it, but still). The publish didn't say they wanted a game that was less fun, just less about fun. As in they were looking for games to have high focus on things like artistic merit, solid storytelling, and stuff like that instead of simple, mindless fun.

 

[Duskflamer]

"We want games that are less about fun right now"

....Murray, I respect that you don't want to name specific people, but cant you at least tell us the company that guy worked for? I will never buy a game from them again in protest of this stupidity.

 

[Alphakirby]

Erm,sorry but how many games that nobody has heard of that are good actually APPEAR in XBLA,most of it gets dumped with the shit in the Indie Games section so it makes it harder to find good games there. Steam is definetly the most indie friendly with Sony far behind only having a handful of games that were made by an indie developer.

P.S. Seriously,XBLA just seems to hate you if you don't have enough money to afford a spot in the not indie games area,when the "New Xbox Experience" first came out,it was damn near impossible to find the indie games.