Text transcript of show #240. November 12, Developing Indie Games for Xbox 360 and XNA with George Clingerman

Transcription

1 Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds. Text transcript of show #240 Developing Indie Games for Xbox 360 and XNA with George Clingerman This week Scott talks to George Clingerman, a member of the Independant Xbox Game Development Community (Indie Games). George is a business developer by day and a game developer by night, using C# and managed code in both instances. How does this all work and how can you develop and sell your own games? (Transcription services provided by PWOP Productions) Our Sponsors Copyright PWOP Productions Inc. Page 1 of 9

2 Lawrence Ryan: From hanselminutes.com, it's Hanselminutes, a weekly discussion with web developer and technologist, Scott Hanselman. This is Lawrence Ryan, announcing show #240, recorded live Thursday,. Support for Hanselminutes is provided by Telerik RadControls, the most comprehensive suite of components for Windows Forms and ASP.NET web applications, online at In this episode, Scott talks with George Clingerman about XNA and indie games for the Xbox 360. Hi. This is Scott Hanselman and this is another episode of Hanselminutes. This week on Hanselminutes we've got George Clingerman who is going to talk to me about XNA and independent gaming. How are you, sir? George Clingerman: Oh, pretty good. Thanks for chatting with me about this. You know, within the.net development space, I feel like I'm a pretty engaged community guy and I know a lot about different community things, but the world of XNA in gaming and managed code on the Xbox is just a foreign thing to me and I'm kind of a little ashamed in a sense that I try to be plugged in as much as I can, but you can't just know everything. So I said George is a guy who knows and who will talk to me about XNA and explain how it is I can write C# and run it on my Xbox. So where do I start? George Clingerman: Well, you start by hitting the recently renamed APHUB forums that used to be the XNA forums and there you can pretty much get everything you need to download and get going. It's funny that you haven't like touch XNA yet being a.net guy because in my head everyone wants to be a game developer so I find this surprising that like everybody who knows.net just hasn't jump on XNA because really if you understand how to do.net programming, it really is not that much more difficult to get up and running with XNA. Once you download the tools and you're in a familiar environment of Visual Studio programming and you're very familiar with C#, there are a few quirks you've got to kind of learn about and understand about game development. I mean, if you're a Win Form developer, Windows Forms is kind of sit there and wait for an event to happen. When you're programming for a game, you basically have things constantly happening because you're running in a tight loop. That takes some adjustment to get used to, but basically most.net developers should be immediately familiar and ready to go within an hour I would say. When I go file a new project, I'm doing this inside of Visual Studio Express or do I have to buy anything? How much money in my bank without...? George Clingerman: Actually, to get up and running you actually don't have to invest on anything. If you've got a PC that runs Visual Studio, you can use Visual Studio Express. The default installation actually installs Express for you. If you have the full blown Visual Studio, if you're one of those lucky guys that actually has it already, you can just add it to that as well and work in your familiar professional environment. But yeah, you can go on with the Express. There's no purchase and you can actually make games for your PC for free as well. Oh, okay. So this is the thing that everyone talks about. With XNA, if I understand correctly I can write games for the Xbox, for the PC, for ZuneHD, and for the phone. George Clingerman: Correct. Although Zune basically with XNA 4.0 that supports Flatbush craft that you can get also on older version that can still go for the Zune. Okay. So then making games on the Zune isn't really significant. Okay, so focus on the phone, the Xbox, and the PC. So if I go and I say found a new project, do I tell it that I'm making a game for all of them or is it a checkbox? Because I suppose that making a... George Clingerman: It's basically a template that you're picking. So you're going to pic, I'm going to make an XNA PC game, an XNA Xbox game, or an XNA Windows Phone 7.0 game. Now one of the cool things they've got about that is once you've got started in one of those projects, you actually can just right click and convert the project to one or the other types as well. So they ve got a lot of little, neat tricks like that where you can start on the PC and you're like, oh, I want to make this for the 360 and target both platforms and you could pretty much just right click on your solution and say make an Xbox 360 project and it just does it. I can understand how that can be possible on the PC and the Xbox. I mean, they both have high resolutions. But what kind of things do I have to consider that are different? Like when you wrote your first game for kids, did you say "All right, I'm going to be 1080p," or what are some of the kinds of the initial decisions you have to make? George Clingerman: Yeah. That's one of the first things you want to do, it's you want to figure out what your resolutions are and then inputs the other things it changes pretty dramatically between the PC and the Xbox because you've got your game pad which will work if they have a USB game pad plugged in, the Xbox controller. But you're really not going to use a keyboard on the Xbox. Those are two things that you basically adjust a lot, and the same thing for the phone. I mean if you're talking about all three platforms, you probably still could reuse a lot of your Page 2 of 9

3 code, your physics engine, etc, but you're still going to be changing your resolution and your input. But for the Xbox, ideally what you want to target is 1280 x 720. That's pretty much what background size you're going for and you want to scale your images accordingly to that. That's actually a fairly decent resolution for the PC as well. Is the Xbox not 1080p? George Clingerman: It is. You can develop true 1080p. The 1280 x 720, what happens with that if you target that particular resolution, the Xbox would do all of its scaling automatically for you. So if people are running different resolutions, the Xbox can handle that by default and so a lot of developers would just target that because it's an easy route to go. Okay. And when I say file new Xbox game and I hit F5 and I'm on my PC developing, what happens? George Clingerman: There's one little step you get to do before you hit F5. Basically you have to have your Xbox and your PC talking to each other. Most people do because they've got Windows Media kind of streamed across to the 360. If they're on the same network, usually it's pretty easy for the PC to find the 360. And then there's a little tool on the Xbox that you would download basically from the marketplace called XNA Connect and you have that up and running on your Xbox 360. That's kind of like a little -- it sits there and wait for that communication to start from your PC and so when you hit F5 it will push out and start talking to that tool and pushing files across and then suddenly you're wonderfully -- the beautifully crafted game is now running on your TV and your 360. Okay. Do I have to like unlock it or it's just a matter of once I have the XNA Connect, that's the handshake that is required in order to make them talk to each other? George Clingerman: Correct. That's all you need, and basically it runs first so anytime you're going to start doing your development, you will launch that first on your 360 and it sits there waiting for the computer to start talking. Okay. George Clingerman: Now to do the development there's a cost involved, there's $100 a year fee to do a 360 development, so that's not completely free. Okay. So when is that required? Is that when I want to upload it to the marketplace, or is that when I want to see...? George Clingerman: No. That's immediately when you want to start pushing your games across to your 360. So if you want to debug and test your games, which is pretty much recommended before you release it to the marketplace, you've got to pay that fee. I see. I see. George Clingerman: So it kind of gives you the right to develop games in your 360. Uh-hmm. George Clingerman: The neat thing about it is it's a 99% discount from the traditional cost of developing games on your 360. What do you mean? George Clingerman: Well, traditionally if you want to develop games with your 360, you've got to buy an Xbox 360 dev kit and usually only in studios can you get those and the rumored price for those is $10,000. Oh, my. That's the rumored price. I don't know. Is that true? Do we know if that's true? George Clingerman: From the legal documents we've seen, there's a court case, I don't know, several years ago and so some of the pricings got released on the court documents so that is our estimated price. We don't know if it had changed since then, but like that's what most of us quote. So you pay 100 bucks and now you have a game for kids that's 80 points. What's 80 points? Like 99 cents? George Clingerman: Yeah, it translates basically to a dollar. get? George Clingerman: I get 70% of it. How much of that dollar do you Cool. That's not too bad. That seems to be the standard thing, right? Whoever is hosting the app store takes 30%. George Clingerman: Correct. Yeah, it's a pretty decent deal. I mean, we've had several people in the community over the last two years who basically ended up quitting their jobs and do game development fulltime. I would say there's been a flood of people that have been wanting to do that, but we definitely have our success stories. How long has this been around? I mean, I know that the iphone app stores were around for a long time but how long do we have an app store in the context of an Xbox? Page 3 of 9

4 George Clingerman: For the Xbox it's been two years. XNA has been around for just little over four years and then initially it was just PC development and then they did a little bit of Zune development and then you could develop for your Xbox 360 but there's no marketplace yet. That kind of took some time to get shaped up and happening and the marketplace have been running for two years now. Where does this show up on the Xbox? I mean, there are probably people who are listening who have downloaded game demos before and they know where their game library appears, but they may never have actually found this section on their Xbox. Where do I go to find independent games on my Xbox? George Clingerman: It's actually in the same place. So when you're going to go buy an Xbox Live Arcade game such as Casual Crushers or any of the bigger titles, it's just a few more menu items up. So there's the Xbox Live Arcade Games and then right above that is the Indie Games so it's right next to the big boys in the marketplace. Games? Was it always called Indie George Clingerman: Initially the focus was more community so it's called Xbox Live Community Games, but a lot of people kind of felt that that got confusing, that maybe like it was just hobbyist only ever doing it or maybe it was like more about socializing and less about game development so there was kind of a push from the community to get that name change and then Microsoft responded and changed it to Xbox Live Indie Games. That's actually a very non- Microsofty name. I like that name. That's way better than Xbox Live Community Games. George Clingerman: Yeah, it's a very cool name. So what's the difference between...? George Clingerman: Although I did kind of like it when it's community games because I'm really about the community so that was kind of a good feeling too, but the name change is better overall. So what is the difference between Xbox Live Arcade Games and Indie Games? Is this just the difference in how much you've paid? Like why wouldn't everyone want to make their game an Indie game and pay less money? George Clingerman: There are several reasons. So Xbox Live Arcade Games can charge a higher price point. The maximum price points that the Xbox Live Indie Games can charge is 400 Microsoft points which is about $5. So the price ranges for Xbox Live Indie Games are $1, $3, and $5. So $5 is just the most you can charge for an Xbox Live Indie Game. Now Xbox Live Arcade Games can charge $20 and more for their downloads. There are a couple of other limitations as well. File size, the maximum size of the game, Xbox Live Arcade has higher restrictions than Xbox Live Indie Games, and then there are some rather large restrictions such as leader boards and achievements. Xbox Live Indie Games can't do leader boards so it's nowhere to having a global high score. Then Xbox Live Indie Games can't do achievements which is actually rather large with the gaming crowd and one of the reasons that Xbox Live Indie Games don't sell as well as they do is that most gamers really like that achievement system. When you buy an Xbox Live Indie Game, it doesn't contribute to your gamer score or to your achievements at all. I see, and gamer score, leader boards, and achievements sound like the kind of things that would make a good game become viral as it were and really popular. George Clingerman: Exactly. Is there an example of an Indie Game that made the leap over from Indie to Arcade? George Clingerman: We've never had a game that started out on Xbox Live Indie Games and made the transition, but we've had people that started out developing with XNA purely that were kind of targeting Xbox Live Indie Games but before they release they were able to go to Xbox Live Arcade. We've had I think four examples of that so far. Typically it's around those. There's what has become pretty much an annual contest although they never said they're going to do it annually called Dream Build Play that Microsoft hosts, and the winner of that Microsoft has the right to offer them an Xbox Live Arcade contract and we've had winners over the past few years that have won that and moved on to Xbox Live Arcade. There are games still developed in XNA, but they're outside the Indie Games section and they can charge higher price points and add achievements and have a gamers' board. There are much bigger successes in that arena. Is there a way to tell if a game is written in XNA? I mean could like Splinter Cell be written in XNA and I don't know it, or is it only Indie Games? George Clingerman: I haven't had this completely confirmed, but the rumor is that there are more games written in XNA than we realize. I'm not sure why publishers don't want to talk about that or game developers don't want to talk about that, but we did find out that lucasarts.com released a game called Lucidity and we believe it's written in XNA simply Page 4 of 9

5 because when you download it off a steam it installs an XNA DLL. You can't tell that on an Xbox obviously, but when you download PC versions of their games you can kind of head that way. So there are games that maybe written in XNA, it's just not become a widespread which I'm not really sure what the political battle there is. Uh-hmm. And if I'm going to write a game so that it works on both Windows and Xbox, is it literally like write once, run anywhere or do I have to build two separate versions of the executable and package it up differently for Windows and Xbox? George Clingerman: You can write once, you'll build it twice but you can still work out one solution and your source code is shared between the two. There are some kinds of like gotchas and caveats you've got to pay attention to. The Garbage Collection on the 360 is horrendous so even though you've got a quad core machine that you're working with, it's running in the compact framework and its version of Garbage Collection is just horrendous and so you definitely don't want to start working on your PC game and being near completion and then suddenly get the idea, oh, I might want to turn this into a 360 game. You definitely want to be working on it in the parallel and testing them both platforms at the same time because there will be times where you've got to make some adjustments and changes based on my performance on one or the other. When you say horrendous, like okay, I assume that's pretty bad and the assumption of course is that the Xbox has like, I don't know, half a gig of RAM and have a slower processor from five years ago. But like your kids' game that I bought has a lot of stuff going on and these are bunch of objects getting created on the screen. It's pretty frantic. George Clingerman: Right. Let's say that you discover that Garbage Collection has a problem, what can you, as a programmer do to fix that? George Clingerman: It's kind of interesting because I think it's one of those things that probably is tapping me more as a business coder than anything else because I've actually used a lot of these tricks and techniques from game development and business coding now. But in things like Foreach loops, there's a lot of like boxing and un-boxing that happens which for a game development I don't really like examine a box and un-box variables and understand what's happening here, but it's those types of things so you might use a different type of loop or create instructs instead of classes in certain cases. What's really interesting when you start a streamlined stuff in getting rid of garbage and watching optimization is you actually start to like inline things rather than like calling methods and creating methods. So you actually start doing a lot of like that programming practices in order to optimize things. Interesting. George Clingerman: Those are the types of tricks you're going to use to increase speed, but one of the things we tell people is never pre-optimize so you usually write your code as you would normally and then you only start optimizing once you've discovered a problem. So you do a lot of testing and benchmarking before you start making your code terrible. Hi, this is Scott coming to you from another place and time. Are you using Agile Practices to manage your software development? There are lots of tools in the market that manage the steps of a project but most of them focus on individual roles. Get ready for a solution that caters to the success of the whole team. The guys at Telerik introduced TeamPulse to the Agile Project Management Tool that will help you gather ideas, estimate, plan, and track progress in a common workspace. Finally, companies, regardless of their size, can use a lightweight and convenient tool that makes all the stakeholders work as a united team even if they're in different countries. By combining intuitive interface and the power of Silverlight, TeamPulse removes the road blocks that you typically face in applying Agile in an effective manner. No more lost data, no desperate systems, no lack of critical analytics regarding the health and velocity of your project. See for yourself, get a free copy for five users in one project at telerik.com/teampulse, and please do thank Telerik for supporting Hanselminutes on their Facebook fan page, facebook.com/telerik. We do appreciate it. There wouldn't be a Hanselminutes if there wasn't Telerik helping us. What's considered, and this is very subjective, but what's considered to be the crown jewel of the Indie Games? Like what's the one game or two games where you go, wow, I can't believe that this is done by a regular person and not a game studio? George Clingerman: That's one hard for me to answer because I think I kind of lost the luster of like looking in studios and seeing them as something that we can't do anymore. It's just like once you've done a game and when you're watching the game you're like, "Oh, I know how they did that. That makes sense, I could have done that." We have our crown jewel in the communities just because it's like the biggest runaway success story, but I don't know that like looking at the game you're super impressed like what XNA can do. It's just probably the most fun game you've played in a while. I made a game with zombies in it. It's basically just a dual stitch shooter where you're destroying a bunch of zombies, but the whole experience is just so incredibly well done from Page 5 of 9

6 like the music is hilarious and funny. It's a guy singing a song and the, you know, effects are incredible and he's got the music timed to the game and there are strobe lights flashing in time to the music. Again, it's only 13 minutes and 37 seconds long which is also a nice, fun, little geek joke and only a dollar which he mentions about five times in the song. Uh-hmm. George Clingerman: I think he's made over $200,000 on that game though. Wow. George Clingerman: So it's kind of our success story and he's one of the few guys that -- he won the Dream Build play, the first one, and got his Xbox Live Arcade contract so he's actually got games on Xbox Live Arcade as well. Oh, wow. George Clingerman: So he's probably our biggest success story so if I was going to say that we have an Indie crown jewel that's not a studio, James Silva is the guy. He would be who I would say represents our crown jewel. That's interesting because if you look at the screenshots for this thing, I made a game with the zombies in it, it's not -- I mean from a screenshot perspective it's like, okay, a child drew these zombies. George Clingerman: Right. It looks kind of simple which I think gets to your point about, you know, it's more about game plan and style. I mean he's got a song, he's got music and it's synchronized. These things are really subtle. I mean, it's not -- you can't judge a book by its cover. George Clingerman: Yeah, it changes the whole experience. It's like how all that ties together that made it so fun. Do you know? Is that available on PC also? George Clingerman: No, he doesn't have it available on PC. It's 360 only currently. Why would someone want something only in the 360? It seems like, again speaking as a person who has never made a game like this, I would want my game to be available in as many places as possible. So if I've got all this kind of intellectual property and I've done all this work, I would think gosh, now that I've got this game I've made a couple of hundred thousand dollars on, let's put it on a phone or let's put it on a PC. George Clingerman: Right. The phone I think a lot of people are going to be considering simply because Microsoft has known the marketplace around the phone. There is no marketplace for the PC and that's the number reason why developers haven't moved over into the PC realm for XNA at least. There's a huge set of costs that most home computers don't have the XNA Reach installed on them so the install package alone is kind of confusing and hard for us people to get right, and then there's just no central distribution center so there's a lot of overhead for developers trying to create their own checkout store and host all that themselves, but that's a lot of extra work. You know, that's a really good point. I mean, people kind of ask what is so important about the app store. I mean, I just went to xbox.com, I clicked on Indie Games on the marketplace and then I just sort it by bestselling of all time, and then I can see right there that s where I made the games with zombies in it and for me to have to go on find that on the web and download it and run setup and all that kind of stuff. I didn't actually realize this until recently that I can actually go there on my PC now and hit download and then go to my 360 later and it will be waiting for me. George Clingerman: There it is. Yup, that's a great little feature too like when you got like some huge game that came out recently that you're excited about and you can start in the morning and just like start your download and then when you get home there it is waiting for you to play. Uh-hmm. George Clingerman: That's fantastic. And I notice that the second most popular game or one of the most popular games just initially looking at it looks like something I would not want to play, Baby Maker Extreme. This looks like a South Park episode and possibly offensive. George Clingerman: The art work is a lot like South Park. That's one of those interesting ones. The game play is basically a physics type game play where you're trying to get this baby that's just been birth to bounce of as many objects as possible to go the distance. So the title is eye-catching, the cover art is eye-catching and the game play is actually relatively fun and it's pretty well-polished. I think the guy was a genius for striking that cord because people go, "Baby Maker Extreme, what is that?" That already gets him the download. Yeah, exactly. Just because we want to know what it is. Page 6 of 9

7 George Clingerman: And then he gets them in there because like the game play is fun so I downloaded it expecting it to be absolutely horrible but it's really well polished. It's actually a lot of fun. Interesting. Are there controls from the Xbox perspective? Like if, I don't know, Major Nelson or somebody in charge goes and says "This is offensive, we're not going to put that in the marketplace." Did your people get kicked out of the marketplace or not allowed in for various reasons? Because you always hear about the iphone people who can't be in the marketplace for some reason. George Clingerman: So for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace, it's a peer review system which means that everyone else like myself who release these games in the system, we review other people that are trying to make games and we kind of review them for technical defaults and anything that's kind of inappropriate for Xbox Live and there s a very tricky list of things that can or cannot be, things that are kind of on the fence or that we can't agree on. You might get some reviewers who are like "No, this is fine. I don't see this as offensive." They may pass it and then it get moved on to the marketplace and at that point the option is that that people can report it for abuse and it might be get pulled then later. So Microsoft kind of stays out of the entire process. Microsoft actually isn t allowed to look in the review or play test that writes it all because they really only see the games once they've hit the marketplace so it's really up to the community that kind of plays that and kind of sets the standard. That's impressive. I mean, as a concept I didn't realize that. So you personally can vote on this with the community and say this is good or bad? George Clingerman: Correct and it's not so much good or bad because we try to take like the subjectiveness out of it. So if I see some of these games and I'm like this app is horrendous, it looks like a kid drew everything in here, actually it could ve been a kid who drew everything in there, I can actually make comments on like whether the game is good or bad, I can make comments on whether it has offensive materials or it crashes. So we try to make things like more black and white rather than subjective. Okay. One thing I notice in looking at the top 30 games, a bunch of them start with the term Avatar: Avatar Paintball, Avatar Drop, Avatar Golf, Avatar Showdown. That can't be a coincidence. There are at least 10 Avatar games. Why is that so...? George Clingerman: So the Xbox Live Indie Games community supports all types of developers. Some people are in it because it's something that they're passionate about. It's a dream. They're working on their dream game. Some people just like the novelty of it. They re some high school kids, they're putting it together, they think it's a great game. Some people are really going about this as a business, and other people are playing to what the consumers seem to want. Avatar games are selling right now so they spend a couple of weeks throwing together some new type of Avatar game and they push it up to the marketplace and they seem to be selling. I mean, they stay fairly high in the top downloads list and so if people are buying them, people are going to make them. Well, definitely it seems like some of these Avatar games are actually very well rated. I mean, just because some things are on the top doesn't mean that I'm going to download it but then I'll see that, well, this has four -- like Avatar and Ninja has four stars and then you look at the screenshots and you say, oh, this actually looks like someone put a little bit of work into it. George Clingerman: Yeah, yup. It kind of varies. It's one of the -- actually kind of like the point of discussion we're having in the community right now is that Xbox Live Indie Games has been around over two years but if you talk to people they either don't know about it or they say, oh, that's for all those Massage apps or Avatar games are. Literally there's like a wide variety of games. We have over, I think it's almost like a 1,050 games in the marketplace currently. So there's really something in there for everybody and there's a lot of very polished games, but it's how do we make that perception that's been achieved over the last two years and partially rightfully so because I mean anybody can release anything they want and so when you hit the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace and you look at new releases at any given week, I mean we're releasing basically three games a day on average right now from the community, and at any given day of those three games it's not really expected that all three of those games will be highly polished works of art. So when someone goes into the store to look at these games, and they're obviously looking at the new releases because that's what they're used to doing with Xbox Live Arcade Games, they're going to see maybe one decent looking game out of a list of 25 to 50 and so it's like how do we manage that perception. So we're kind of talking with Microsoft right now and talking in the community about how can we change this. Maybe a new release doesn't make sense for people to land. I mean, that should not be the landing page because that's not like, you know. It does it like equal what it does for Xbox Live Arcade because Xbox Live Arcade has a very -- Microsoft controls like the release schedule for Xbox Live Arcade. They try not to flood the market with too many Xbox Live Arcade games. They are polished games that went through a very intensive QA system, whereas in Xbox Live Indie Page 7 of 9

8 Games, anybody can make anything. So it's a different type of experience. I mean, we kind of have to figure out how to change what people are seeing, their perception of it. Yeah. I've noticed that myself sitting in my living room and looking at these games -- and to be clear to the listeners I don't know any of these people so if I mention a particular game or not, this is just my opinion, it's nothing else, but like I see a game here that says, it's called Minor Dig Deep and "the box" shot looks like a child drew it and I'll say "Well, this is a lame-looking box top, I think this looks lame." Then I'll look the screenshot and I'll say, well, that looks actually kind of nice. So I balance my perception of the game based on -- like in this case low points for box shot which sounds ridiculous like what does the box have to do with the game play, but it does affect what you think about like this person put effort into it. It's like the guy particularly created the box. George Clingerman: Oh yeah, definitely. It's actually one of the things I recommend to people like if they're going to invest as an Indie Game developer. If they want to pay for anything, pay for your box art. So spend a couple of hundred dollars to pay first in decent looking cover art. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then like for example I'm looking at Inside Lacrosse and it's almost like the box is a rip off of like a classic sports game like Madden. George Clingerman: Right. And when I say rip off, I don't mean like rip off. I mean more like let's say homage, but it's like, wow, okay, this person is effectively saying with their box art that LaCrosse is a cool game that electronic arts has ignored and so I'm making a LaCrosse game, and then you look at the screenshot and it looks like that's exactly what it is, then you balance it with the fact that it's 4-1/2 stars rated by a lot of people and you say, well, there you go. Here's a perfect example where someone the developer felt that the regular marketplace was not serving him and went and fixed that problem which I think is pretty cool. George Clingerman: Yeah, it's one of the best things about Indie games; is that you can basically attempt anything. I mean it's a perfect sandbox to try anything you want. If there's a game that doesn't exists, you have the power to go make that. It's interesting though that you spend so much decision making process on, oh, look at the box art, look at the rating, look at the stars because most of the games are a dollar. It's strange that people who own their phones do all these impulse buys and don't seem to really care, but when they're sitting down in their living room looking through their Xbox 360 somehow the desire to do impulse buys go away or they don't seem to think about it. I've seen the other day Major Nelson was tweeting about how this big game was on sale and it was $25 and I replied to him, I said "that's 25 Indie Games. So you're telling me you can buy this studio produced game on sale for $25 and you're going to get more fun than potentially 25 original creative polished games that no one seems to know or talk about?" Like it's no foreign to me that when I go into impulse buys, we think we shouldn't be getting like we're trying to figure out what's going on there as well. Why do people even think about that? Why don't we get impulse buys? You know, that's a really good question. I mean, I've got an iphone and I've spent probably 10 bucks a month on 99-cent games but when I go to the marketplace, honestly you can tell your they'll be listening to this, you can tell your Indie Games friends that that box art is significant., the title of the game and the box art, and then also when you have a lot of these things. Like I'm looking at the Indie Games and I see, I'm just kind of like scrolling through this giant grid of about 90 games, I see a lot of games for like How to Meet Women and like I said Massage games, just things that seem very childish and kind of unprofessional and then after you scroll pass like 10 or 20 of those, you'll find something that looks like a real game. George Clingerman: Yeah. The Penny Arcade guys talk about it like it's going to like a bazaar or like it might have been a dumpster diving type of thing like basically you have to like wonder around and look around the corner and then off in the corner you see this great gym. It's the unfortunate thing about the way the marketplace is for us right now, it's that you have to actually have to hunt for the good ones. They're not just right there in your face. Right. George Clingerman: I mean, we could list the good ones. We all know they're good ones but it's hard to get that and it's because that new releases list is what people see. I mean, we have a way of getting in a routine that the new releases are going to be what's great. Well, and that's kind of the... George Clingerman: It's also interesting because I mean like the Xbox market is like the demographic is just so skewed and people are making the games that people are buying currently. Some of our great games just aren't getting purchased and so what's happening is good developers are leaving the system or looking elsewhere. They don't see the point because people don't want to buy those date games and all those Avatar games and fart apps. So it's how do we get like the more professional market. Who's going to spend lots of money to start making the Page 8 of 9

9 purchases on some of these decent games to attract more developers? So like the cycle goes the other way. Uh-hmm. If the marketplace is broken, if the way people find these games is broken in the sense of like I'm scrolling through -- the website is pretty good though. I mean, I've got like best selling today, top rated, these are all things that I can use right now to make a decision. I could just say sort by top rated and just using box art as a personal litmus test. If I go and switch it to top rated, immediately everything with the nice box art that is highly rated and looks good shows up. I mean, all that stuff that we've just talked about that we don't want to see does disappear. George Clingerman: Right. That's what we keep saying. We think that has a lot to do with this. The other thing, you're on the web right now? Uh-hmm. George Clingerman: Most people don't use the web interface. Most people use the Xbox dashboard. You see, that's my point. I mean, in web interface I can see 90 games sorted by top rated and then buy them here. George Clingerman: Yeah. But on the Xbox, I see like five and all I see is box art. George Clingerman: Yeah. Well, that's one of the neat things with the new dashboard update. It's that now you will see 50. You do have to scroll. Hmm. And I see ratings too. George Clingerman: You just scroll and you see five, six at a time depending on how big your TV is, but the list is now 50 for scrolling so that's a nice change for us. really, truly believed it would happen and then XNA came along, I mean it's kind of a fluke; a lot of things just lined up at the right time and I love this community. There's so much to do. I mean, I'm writing a book for Windows Phone 7.0 right now for game developments so I mean I'm planning on being around, get involved quite a bit. One of the cool things about this is the XNA team, the developers themselves are super active and involved in the community. One of the lead developers for the team is actually one of the highest posters on our question and answer forum so I think that's fairly rare. I don't know if any other Microsoft technical communities have like the developer actually being one of the highest posters. Very cool. George Clingerman: So it's definitely a team that listens and the community just -- it's a really interesting and neat experience just being among all these Indie Game developers. Everything is happening from different angles. A lot of these guys are trying to make it as their fulltime business and they hang on Twitter all the time, they're pretty involved in forums and it's a great, great support network. I mean, dumps ideas off each other and helping each other polish the games. So it's definitely a community I'm planning on being part of for quite awhile. All right. Well, thanks so much for talking with me today and folks can check out George's website and blog and Twitter that link to them from xnadevelopment.com and I'll also add a bunch of the sites that we've talked on the show notes. Thanks a lot for talking with me today. George Clingerman: Thank you. This has been another episode of Hanselminutes and we'll see you again next week. That's good. George Clingerman: But we still need to kind of change what people are seeing first when they hit that marketplace. Absolutely, absolutely. Do you think you're going to leave because of this -- I mean, you don't know. I assume you're still having fun or you would have stopped by now. George Clingerman: No. I mean, I love this. I love this community. I love what I do. I mean I get to make games for the 360. I mean it's like the, I don't know, since I was a young kid I mean the whole reason I got into development was for games so I don't think I ever Page 9 of 9