Xbox 360 holder 'refused to publish Machinarium due to non-exclusivity'
Develop Award-nominated Czech studio Amanita Design is no longer interested in future business deals with Microsoft, the studio’s founder has said.
Amanita, developer of unique adventure games Samorost and Machinarium, is believed to have been refused the opportunity to publish its games across Xbox Live Arcade.
The studio’s founder, Jakub Dvorský (pictured, centre), plans to bring PC title Machinarium to PS3 and tablet devices this year.
“We were already refused by Microsoft to bring the game to Xbox,” he said, as quoted by CasualGaming.biz
“They weren’t interested because the game was already released for Mac and Windows, and Microsoft demanded it as part of an exclusivity deal,” he added.
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“We’re not interested in Microsoft anymore.”
Comparing developer relations from different platform holders, Dvorský said the game development process is “much easier if you create a game for PC and Mac”.
“Bringing it to consoles is a lot of hard work and a lot of hassle with companies,” he added.
Isn't this a little misleading? This was also reported on various sites last year (April, IIRC). As I understood it, the issue was that the developers wanted Microsoft to publish the game on XBLA themselves, i.e. make it a Microsoft Game Studios title. MS only do that for exclusives, which makes sense as they want to put their own time and money into games that will help sell systems. Machinarium is available on other platforms so Microsoft declined to publish the title.
There's nothing stopping the devs getting the game on XBLA if they find a publisher willing to help them do so, but presumably they don't want to lose such a large cut of the income from the sales that a publisher would take.
MS have done nothing wrong here IMO, other than possibly not making it easy enough for devs to self-publish their work on the XBLM, such as they can (apparently) do fairly easily on PSN.
Same feeling here, working with MS. We have an exclusive title, cancelled even the game is finished. Too bad, we will work on iphone and android.
I don't see the big deal... Those games have been out for awhile & probably wouldn't sell well on the Xbox... I played both of them and they were just OK.
Microsoft only publishes about 25 Xbox Live titles a year... To be included in that 25 you've got to have something special; and without an exclusive deal those games are not special. Even with an exclusive deal MS may have turned them away, they wouldn't even look at the game if they wouldn't go exclusive.
With only 25 games published each year you've got to be the best of the best... That's one reason why I like XBLA, about 95% of the games on there are well made, decent games.
