Indie help! XBLA, WiiWare, PSN or PC?
Choosing which gaming platform to develop for is a difficult decision, yet it’s one which many indie developers take too quickly. I’m going to share a few thoughts that I hope will help guide developers in the right direction, and that may provoke discussion amongst developers of all levels of experience.
A question I hear all the time from indie developers is:
How do we get on Xbox Live Arcade?
To which my answer is:
Are you sure you want to be on there?
That’s when they look at me with wild, ‘are you mental?’ eyes. They often don’t really have an answer - it’s just because they heard that it was popular. Don’t get me wrong - XBLA is a platform with a lot of potential and it can really work for indies. However, developers need to carefully consider what platform they want to develop on - companies live or die on this decision.
Over the next few days I’ll post up some pros and cons of XBLA, WiiWare, PSN and also digital distribution on the PC.
Follow me here where I’ll discuss the most well known of the platforms, Xbox Live Arcade.
Tags: console, development, indie, pc, platforms, psn, wiiware, xbla
Will you be covering the iPhone? I think people may be interested.
Don’t forget the mac
Setting your heart on any one of the “indie friendly” platforms is certainly an extremely risky proposition.
My advice is always* to play it safe: get popular on the PC (not necessarily releasing anything… you could just generate buzz to show platform holders that there’s interest) and see where it takes you.
*Well. Now, at least :/
I will come up with something for both iPhone, Mac and Mobile.
Aubrey, you are competely right. As I cover each platform in turn, it should become clearer to independents that consoles are not the be all and end all. It’s easy to underestimated what’s involved.
The PC is a great starting place, but has its own issues that are sometimes forgotten.