XBox Live

I've had a 'nibble' from a publisher regarding XBox Live.
It probably won't amount to anything, but I know next to nothing about this crazy Xbox thingy.

They mentioned multi-player, but can Blitz games even run on this service?

Has anyone here had any experience with XBLA?

(Might this be my excuse to buy one of these crazy new-fangled console thingies?)

no blitz isn't compatible with it

Ok - but how do you know that?

MadJack, you might want to dig around here a bit:

http://www.xbox.com/en-us/dev/default.htm

Xbox live is expensive. From what I understand you need aproximately $70,000 - $100,000 to develop a game, get the hardware, and pass QA testing. Which for most just isn't going to happen. Competition is pretty fierce now and the perks to help you get your game out aren't as readily avaliable as they used to be.

Evak

Just found this quote 'Right now, I wouldn't consider attempting to make an XBLA game with a $100,000 budget. Development kits and Certification (QA testing) would eat up half of that, not leaving much for the actual game development'

So that's small indie devs out then. Way to go MS.

This 'nibble' I've had must be on the farside of likelihood!

How old is that quote? Microsoft recently cut the royalty rate for first party developers so that they could absorb much of those advance costs which were pricing out smaller developers.

I don't really see why the costs are an issue for you though. If a publisher is interested, the XBLA fees are going to be their problem, not yours. Third party royalties, I've been led to believe, have not dropped, although you'll obviously only be getting a percentage of a percentage.

Cool. The quote was from Sep 2006, so good to hear MS have brought things down a little.

I've emailed the publisher back with answers to his questions, so I'll see what happens next.

Of course if TU could be ported to XBLA, that would be mind blowing, but I'm not holding my breath ;-)

there was a more recent article comparing the cost of developing developing on all the consoles including handhelds. Was still about the same. 36o was cheaper than PSP and Wii. Can't remember if it was DS and iphone that wete cheaper. Can't find the article.

Quite a few games get picked to greenlight testing, including Aerial Antics, which was what Jeremy's recent updated version with online leaderboards and MP was triggered by.

That's encouraging - I remember Aerial Antics was a cool Blitz game (so what was boomboom talking about?).

I'll see what i can find out about AA's progress. Jeremy's probably got a blog somewhere...