An Open Indie-tation To Console Manufacturers

I recall the excitement of first experiencing games on the current generation of consoles, and the twinkle of an idea in the back of my mind, "wouldn't it be incredible to make a game for these beasts." In the several years that followed, that feeling inevitably subsided as desktops caught up and surpassed consoles in terms of raw power. I eventually followed up on that twinkle of an idea, and two years ago I started work on Folk Tale having stepped out of the games industry for quite some time. I took the contrarian view and while so many developers headed for the golden shores of mobile development, I remained true to my raw-power whorish nature and focused on desktop ever hopeful that one day I might get to develop for consoles.

As we awake to a new dawn for consoles, I once again feel the twinkle of hope and desire. But then I slap myself and remember that for the best part of forever consoles have remained off-limits to most indie developers. So in an open invitation from an indie developer to console manufacturers, I implore you to deliver on your plans to become indie friendly.

I invite you to increase accessibility by reducing financial barriers. By all accounts thousands of dollars for a dev-kit is not considered as being indie friendly. In an ideal world the notion of dedicated hardware dev-kits would cease to exist, allowing us to debug projects on retail units as with iOS.

I invite you to make our relationship a pain-free and enjoyable experience. We don't have piles of cash for certification fees, companies with financial history, or the funds to pay for updates to better serve our shared customers.

I invite you to reduce technical barriers by supporting game engines that in turn support widely adopted programming languages such as C# and have huge communities essential to the indie developer reaching out for technical assistance.

I invite you to open up your distribution channel to provide indie developers with greater access to our end customers. By all means avoid the mistakes of an Android free-for-all and introduce a quality threshold similar to the Apple model.

And finally I invite you not to fall for the misnomer of always-on DRM. Haven't we seen enough blood spilled recently?

I'm sure myself and thousands of other indie developers are waiting with great anticipation. I know for one I'd love to bring Folk Tale to console.