Earlier today, Gamasutra posted an excerpt of an interview with Jonathan Blow, creator of platforming masterpiece Braid. In it, Blow took issue with a number of the certification and business-oriented processes behind bringing his game to XBLA, including “unnecessary requirements” and issues with the revenue model. It’s valuable to get this kind of insight into the publisher/developer relationship, particularly when small teams are bringing truly unique titles to massive publishers, and as such, the story is getting a bit of attention.
But this may not be the full story, after all. Minutes ago, Blow himself left a new comment on the Gamasutra story, reminding readers that he is not quite an anti-Microsoft crusader, and we shouldn’t characterize him as such.
Hmm, this makes me seem extremely negative toward Microsoft, when that’s really not how it is. Yes, there were some negative interactions during development, but they were also cool about a lot of things.
They didn’t try to dictate the game design, as many publishers might — they were very hands-off there, and what is in the final game is exactly what I wanted to put there. They also bent a lot of XBLA rules, in order to help me make the game the way I wanted, which was pretty cool of them. (For example, the way in which you can launch Braid and be directly in the game — that is technically illegal if you go by the book, but they saw what I was trying to do and went with it.)
So I just want to add some balance here. For the most part working with Microsoft has been great. There have been occasional problems, including one that I was very upset about — but there are people at Microsoft who really got the game and worked very hard to help bring it to completion, and it would just be wrong to slight their contribution with some kind of blanket “Microsoft = Bad” attitude.
Fair enough, Mr. Blow. Congratulations on your fantastic game, and keep us posted on your future projects.
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