Ryan Ellis

Currently I am in the middle of no-where. All my friends are far away and I am pretty isolated. I have to say that if it was not for the built-in chat functions of the 360 I would have lost contact with them almost completely. Now Sony touts their system as being “open” meaning that it is up to the developer to decide what to include with their games. Now for the most part this sounds like a pretty neat thing… Oh wow a console maker that does not care what you do… Sweet!!! But in reality it is hurting them in a fundamental way. Community. As a developer you always struggle to build up a community for your game. Be it active forums , online play, or whatever. The really neat thing about the Xbox is that it really does come with allot of that taken care of for you. You don’t have to build allot of that infrastructure its built in. Just the fact that I can chat with someone who is playing a totally different game than I am is pretty damn sweet. It all really helps you build your own community if there is already a very active one on the system. Now if we were coming out on Sony’s platform we would probably be missing most of those features because we don’t have the manpower to handle them. That fact alone makes LIVE a huge boon for us. Another reason that the Xbox system is great for us is that the active community allows for a great pipeline for word of mouth sales. Peoples friends can go online and sell them on our game without that other person even having to be playing it. Now you might say what about PS3 Home? Well i gotta say… It looks really annoying to me. I have not had the experience of using it yet so that’s a knee jerk reaction. But the sweet thing about the Xbox system is that its always running. You don’t have to start up a separate app to go visit your friends. That alone makes it shitty. (IMHO) Wow I have really gotten off-topic here. But long story short. Gaming has become my main social connection with my friends thanks to LIVE. I would gladly pay the 50 dollars a year just for that. I just realized how ass-kissy this post is getting. Ugg.

Nebs Game Developement