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Comment by soundoflight | Hacker News Reader

Why does Xbox Live Indies (previously called Community Games) not count? Microsoft has had that in for a few years on the 360. There are quite a few really good non-minecraft clones on that service.

As for Sony, what about the fact that they have a similiar thing on PS Vita with the Playstation Mobile Developer program.

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I briefly touched on this in the post, and did kind of hand-wave it away, but this Reddit comment sums up my research: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18irx0/the_minecraft_...

Now, I'm really curious about the next-gen Xbox, which will almost undoubtedly be built on a version of Windows 8. Hopefully this means the same tools for developing Xbox, Windows Phone, Surface, and desktop apps (HTML-based, if I recall)

Down voted since you apparently didn't read the article. The author specifically addresses Xbox Live Indies.

Before I read the article I agreed but turns out there's a pretty solid point in there. It's funny how the consoles are racing towards this whole notion of the physical media doesn't matter when that seems to be precisely where consumers attribute the value.

Excellent point about consumers attributing value to things they can hold in their hands. The same is true of written content; in my experience information on paper is a lot easier to sell than the same information hosted on a website.

The attraction of moving to digital media is clear (instant delivery, no overheads, easier to control copying etc) but consumers can be reluctant to pay for anything they can't touch.

The article true Scotsmanned the Xbox approach and the above comment rightly describes this with the phrase "not count". The article's arguments are severely undermined by the Xbox ecosystem and its dismissal by the author is intellectually lazy and his dismissive claim is unsupported within the piece.

As someone making his full time income from game development for the past several years, the common wisdom among developers is that there's a handful of commercially successful games on XBLIG (which is not the same as the much more successful XBLA) & that you can pretty much discount that as a profitable option if you intend on making a commercial indie game.

It is simply a lot harder to make money on XBLIG than on Steam/app store/play market.

As someone who has never touched XBLIG as a dev or XNA, why do most of the games on XBLIG look so horrible? Is it just a bad SDK from Microsoft or can they just not attract top end development talent?

Low likelihood of profitability make putting a considerable budget behind an XBLIG game an irrational risk. Technically there is no reason you won't be able to make good looking games with xna (at least in 2d, not any worse than what you can get running on flash or iphone).

The "top end" developers mostly go straight to XBLA.

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