David Edery and Daniel Cook

There was nothing else quite like Xbox Live Arcade when the digital distribution service came into its own in the early days of the Xbox 360. With much of the gaming public then familiarizing itself with the concept of the “indie game developer” for the first time, said developers needed a way to bring the masses their low-cost titles. Microsoft gave them just that in the form of XBLA, but not every indie studio was able to use the service to smoothly propel their game releases towards success. According to the man who at the time oversaw those releases, that’s just the nature of the entertainment business.

Speaking with GamesBeat, Spry Fox cofounder David Edery stated that it was unfortunate to see certain developers fail to get their games released on XBLA and others fail to find success once they did. However, the former worldwide games portfolio manager for Xbox Live posited that that scenario was inevitable.

“I saw people throwing themselves at [Xbox Live Arcade’s] gates and failing to get in, and failing,” Edery recounted. “I saw people who got into the program but then didn’t handle themselves correctly, and fail. I mean, it sucks. It sucks to watch people try so hard and not get anywhere. The thing is, to some extent, in any entertainment business, that’s unavoidable. There will always be more people trying to come in than the industry can support. [Former Microsoft Studios game designer Daniel Cook] and I both feel really strongly about doing whatever we can to help as many people as we can, knowing there’s obviously no way we’re going to help the majority.”

Though he stopped short of naming specific developers, Edery also noted that there exists no shortage of talented independent game designers who are out of their element when it come to business matters. He was saddened to see many of them put everything they had into a game’s development only to “get slaughtered” upon release because of their lack of business acumen.

Regular XBLA Fans readers will recall a multitude of stories centering around disgruntled independent Xbox Live Arcade game developers. Uber Entertainment, Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow are perhaps the most-well-known examples, but they are far from the only ones.

Still, Edery explained that while supply eventually outstripped demand to the point at which business knowledge and development skill were crucial for success, it wasn’t always that way. Things were different in the beginning of his 2006-2009 reign at Xbox Live.

“It was a unique confluence of events that resulted in Xbox Live Arcade’s unbelievable success in its early days,” he said. “But the bottom line is if you were one of the first whatever twentysomething games to ship on XBLA, it didn’t really matter how bad your game was — you were guaranteed a profit. There was a major supply and demand imbalance.”

Eventually, indie developers were emerging from all corners of the globe, and competing platforms like Steam and the PlayStation Network were happy to provide a more developer-friendly home for their games than Microsoft was at the time. Sony was able to lure Edery and Cook’s Spry Fox studio over to the PS4, where the team’s Road Not Taken is scheduled to release on August 5. Still, like many of their peers in the indie development community, the pair are happy to have seen Microsoft take steps to turn things around, like introducing the ID@Xbox program.

“We’re in the program now,” Edery explained. “We’ve talked to [Microsoft] about this game and about other stuff. We’re just delighted to see them embracing indie games.”

Source: GamesBeat