Changes ahead
30 09 13 - 20:26 The last couple months brought some big changes to the world of indie developers. The loudest ones were annoucements of independent developer programs both for Playstation 4 and Xbox One, but one that came pretty unnoticed was that Steam is going to accept much more entries than it used to for publishing. Last month they greenlit a hundred titles and they're saying that they'll continue to increase their throughput.This is a game changer for every small-sized indie developer. Being able to publish your title to a 50-million audience of core gamers is something that I've always dreamed of. And that's the main reason I decided to work on Oozi – I was really disappointed with how Xbox Live Indie Games developers were treated by press, gamers and by Microsoft. Oozi was a bigger, more polished title than any game I had made before and I was hoping that it would allow me to leave XBLIG, but unfortunately it still turned out to be too low to be approved by Steam.
However, with the changes to Steam's publishing policy, we might be able to finally have it released – we're currently sitting on #61 top voted spot, and with Steam's current rate of approving titles, we should be greenlit by the end of November. When I found out about this, I decided to submit two other titles – I, Zombie and Yet Another Zombie Defense. The former is doing fairly well and the latter a bit worse, but it’s possible that I'll have them both released on Steam in the next year – something I never thought might happen.
All those changes – the opening of Steam's gates, and the arrival of next-gen consoles, make me lean towards the decision of abandoning XNA and switching to Unity. While XNA is a great tool and I have a lot of experience with it, is has officially been pronounced dead by Microsoft and doesn't officially support any platforms other than XBLIG and Windows. I'll certainly keep using it to deliver Yet Another Zombie Defense 2 to Xbox Live Indie Games and possibly to Steam, but I'll probably also port the game to Unity – which will allow me to release it for all mobile platforms and maybe next-gen consoles as well. And that's where my adventure with XNA will most likely end.
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