Blow: Consoles Are Handicapped by Corporate Culture

Braid creator, Jonathan Blow, criticizes the 360 and PS3 dashboards while praising iOS.

Microsoft’s certification process for digital games has come under public scrutiny once again following Fez developer, Phil Fish’s, claims that the red tape surrounding title updates has made it impossible for him to fix a broken patch. Indie developers have been complaining about the hassle involved in getting a digital title onto consoles for years. World of Goo developer, Ron Carmel, called working with Microsoft “excruciating.” Joe Danger developer, Sean Murray, referred to XBLA as a “slaughterhouse” for small developers and Derek Yu, creator of Spelunky, has warned other developers away from the service, citing huge costs. Now Braid developer, Jonathan Blow, is once again adding his voice to the chorus.

“There is almost no certification process for iOS, so by the Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo theory, the apps should be crashing all the time, everyone should think of iOS as sucky, etc,” he told Ars Technica. “But in fact this is not what is happening. There is no public outcry for more testing and robustness of iOS software.”

Blow also had harsh words for the consoles’ interfaces, accusing them of serving corporate needs before those of the user.

“The edge that both Apple and Valve have going into the future is that they both genuinely care about the end-user experience and want to make it as good as possible,” he said. “Which coincidentally seems to be the place that these consoles are handicapped due to their corporate culture. Can anyone look at the current 360 or PS3 dashboards and legitimately say that those are products of an entity that deeply cares about user experience?”

Source: Ars Technica