William Willing

Today I received an e-mail from the Xbox LIVE Team, telling me - amongst other things - that Xbox LIVE Community Games will henceforth be known as Xbox LIVE Indie Games. I don’t actually get any Community/Indie Games on my Xbox, as my region doesn’t seem to have that feature, but let’s not dwell on that.

I believe Microsoft is doing serious indie game developers a disservice with this name change. A lot of the Community Games are poor quality games, developed by lowly skilled hobbyist. That’s not really a problem, as far as I’m concerned. However, by changing the name from Community Games to Indie Games, gamers will soon associate the term indie game with poor quality and that’s bad news.

Serious indie game developers are not just trying to make cool games, they are trying to run a business, and in business, audience perception counts. When gamers start to think that indie games are mostly bad, it will hurt the entire indie game market.

After writing about my experience with trying to sign up for Xdrive yesterday, I decided that I should write Xdrive customer support an e-mail. That wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do, since their email address is nowhere to be found on their website.

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So, what is wrong with this form? Quite a few things, actually. (Starting with the fact that I can’t link to it. Just try to sign up with Xdrive if the shrunken image below isn’t clear enough for you.)

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A couple of days ago, I placed an order with an office supplier. It was my first order with them and obviously they want to hook me as a return customer. To that end, they offered me a free gift today, but with a slight twist.

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A lot of application and game developers, especially independent ones, are concerned with supporting previous versions of Windows. The more versions of Windows you support, the larger your potential customer base and more customers means more profit. There is an additional reason to be conservative about new technologies, though.

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