14 DAY TRIAL // According to Microsoft Studios vice-president Phil Spencer, digital publishing platforms have saved the middle-class of the gaming industry.
The recent growth of digital distribution services on consoles made it so that a more diverse and ambitious array of titles can be served to the console community, even titles that are no longer practical on the PC.
“I think a real savior for us has been the advent of the digital stores, whether it's PSN or Xbox Live Arcade. What it's meant is that studios don't have to look at retail as the only way that they can sell their content,” Phil Spencer commented during an OXM interview.
He said that a couple of years ago there was a rising concern that the mid-tier games will soon die out, because they couldn't scale with the heavyweight titles such as Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto or Halo, and they had no other avenue for finding consumers.
“A couple things have happened: you've seen the advent of [Apple's] App Store, Android, and large-scale devices where a lot of those developers have gone, and there's been some great games created for those devices,” the Microsoft vice president explained.
Microsoft has continually redefined and streamlined its Xbox Live publishing policies in order to facilitate the process. There are now fewer hoops developers have to jump through and fewer fees to pay.
Most recently, the ID@Xbox self-publishing program has been started in order to appeal to indie devs, and the projections are that the consoles will soon start feeling more like the other devices in terms of the diversity of available content.
“A unique capability on consoles is to play a game like Ryse; there may have some of that on PC, but most of the PC games are service based, just because the retail market for PC games is a real challenge: to sell a single-player offline game,” Spencer went on.
He finished by stating that although there have been some successful single-player titles for the PC, such as Diablo, the medium is more challenging.
He presented his trust that the console will be able to manage both ends of the spectrum, both the beautiful triple-A releases and the breadth of content that comes from smaller studios