During GDC 2011, Gamasutra Editor in Chief, Brandon Sheffield  and Game Developer Magazine held a discussion with some of the most successful Xbox Live Indie Game developers including James Silva, Robert Boyd, Nathan Fouts, and Ian Stoker.  They all provided insight and a little bit of ranting about the games that they create for the indie lineup.

According to James Silva who created the 2009  successful indie title, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 which has sold 308,000 copies since it’s release in 2009, the developers are not allowed to create games involving killing things like Nazi’s and hunting people.

“That’s like an inherent human right that’s been taken away from us.  We grew up on killing Nazis.” According to Joystiq, Silva later talks about a game concept he had that was not allowed, because you played a “burly mountain man” who hunts people.

Whoever gets to publish their game on the indie network receive 70% of revenue, while Microsoft keeps 30%.  This has helped to provide Silva with the ability to pay his three person staff which includes his girlfriend, a regular salary.

A topic that all of the developers are united on is the lack of support on Microsoft’s end for advertising.  They claim that most if not all of the advertising is done by themselves through Youtube trailers, press releases, and even making wiki pages and finding advertisers for their games themselves.  Both Robert Boyd and Ian Stoker have created their own promotions for their games and even got together to do a cross advertising of Cthulu Saves the World and SoulCaster II.

To read more of the excerpts from the panel including what the developers were doing before they started developing the Indie Games for Xbox Live,  on Armless Octopus.

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Dang. 30% just to publish it. If MS isn't doing any advertisement for it that seems steep, but what do I know about the cost of publishing.

That's the price of remaining indie. There are publishers like Paradox Interactive that would snatch some of these indie devs up and advertise/promote their games. If I can get Mark Leung into talks with Paradox, then they can for themselves as well. Who am I? lol

"No advertising and no over the top violence geared towards certain things on XNA titles". I read about this a lot, from indie developers. Well, yeah. Your games end up on the Games Marketplace. There is no ESRB ratings for XNA titles. It's handled by the indie community itself, with a 0 through 3 system. It's also why there's no avatar weapons (sans lightsabers) or violence. Microsoft, and more specifically, Xbox 360, are trying to become a more family friendly console.

There are are at least 2-6 XNA titles released almost every day on Xbox LIVE. How is Microsoft supposed to promote or advertise that many games? If they slowed down the pace of the releases of those XNA titles, that would become another area indie developers would wince at. They have a distribution outlet for their games, where they get more than half of the profits. I think 70% is pretty fair. If they thought it wasn't, too, why would they even bother showcasing and selling their games on the indie section of Xbox LIVE? It's not like they didn't know beforehand. Microsoft is very thorough with their paperwork, guidelines, Terms of Use, NDA's etc etc.

Frankly, I'm very surprised to see Silva's (Dishwasher) name attributed to this story. He was the crown Prince of Indie games. MS loves him, and as far as I know, always treated him well. More so than other indie developers.

I was a bit miffed by it when I first read it. They seemed to complain more than anything which is fine, because I'm sure that Microsoft does not make it easy for them to get their games published. But then at the same time, they do have games being published on the indie service. They are getting paid...enough so that they can afford to pay other people to work for them. Like the "we can't make a game about killing people like Nazis" issue. If you don't like it, take your idea elsewhere or work on getting your game mainstream. Oh that's right, there are already enough of games out there with Nazi's. Same thing with zombies.

Oh well. Whatever, lol.

Yeah. I don't think they realize that a great part of most indy games is how different they are from mainstream.