A lot of indie devs put a lot of hard work into their creations, unlike some of the big name developers. I seriously hope this isn't true, Microsoft would be missing out on so much.
Oh, and inb4 Sexualchocolate.

Where there's smoke, there's fire...so it's probably true.

Ahhh, the power of the almighty dollar.

While it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, I'm not buying at this point. If there's one thing we know for sure, it's that Microsoft loves money, and aome of it's best selling games (Castle Crashers, Braid) are indie games.

I doubt Microsoft would be willing to make less money off XBLA due to some publisher's whining. I mean, what's the publisher gonna do? Stop supporting the 360 or XBLA?

Why, that would be stupider than Activision pulling support from Sony!

Though I do fully acknowledge that I could be wrong, the way I see it, MS holds all the cards here and they're not going to turn away money or games that make them.

Not trying to play devil's advocate or anything, but I'm pretty skeptical about this. Considering Castle Crashers and Braid are two of the top selling games to ever hit XBLA, pushing out indie devs just because they're indie would be absurd. Reading the article Jim linked, it sounds like the more plausible cause of this is that this anonymus Austrailian indie dev made an absolutely shit game and is butthurt that Microsoft didn't want to release it on XBLA.

All just speculation of course.

in after aerofan11.

Wait, what?

IF YOU'RE NOT INDIE F*** YOU!!!

and a petition.

Castle Crashers is not an independent game, they had Alien Hominid, which was extemely successful on the last gen and arcade.

There's no fine line between indie and major developers. Is it measured by how much capital a game developer has?

indie rock sucks

* Go to PSN. For now, PS3 has better small games.

Sounds like a rumor started by a Sony Fanboy to me.....XBL Arcade has continued to deliver year in and year out.....so no complaints from me.

If this is true then MS can fuck off.

Seriously, I don't know why everyone is acting surprised. After all, this is M$ we're talking about.

It's not about games, it's about money. For some lame reason My Aquarium has been in the top 5 on Wii Ware from day one. Games like "Go Kill an Elk" is going to sell 10x what a super awesome indie title will. It'a sickness of mediocrity and we are being lead by the lowest common denominator.

Indie developers aren't going anywhere so long as games like Castle Crashers continue to sell as well as they do.

While I do think that pushing out the indie devs is incredible stupid, it would also make sense from a marketing standpoint. Right now, the Community Games/Indie Game Channel is doing horrible. Having the developers of Castle Crashers and Braid forced onto Indie Games would buff up the power of that channel, and give it some recognition.

Like it or not, there are still egos to be stroked, and I'm sure some of the big name publishers don't like being upstaged by independent developers with original IP that the publishers don't get to own. For that, they probably want XBLA as their playground.

On the other hand, if Microsoft were to do this, wouldn't it make sense for them to also parse out some of the remakes? For example, Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3 being alongside Geometry Wars is silly. It would be smarter to create a Vintage Games Channel or something to combat Nintendo's Virtual Console.

That actually brings to mind a question. Microsoft won't give the Xbox Originals their own Achievements because, as they put it, the original games didn't have Achievements on Xbox. Why then does Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin, and Pac-Man have Achievement on XBLA? I'm pretty sure the Sega Genesis and Arcade cabinets didn't have those back in the day.

I love my Xbox 360, but the the Live Arcade and Community Games browsers are currently complete shit.

Cover flow doesn't work well for hundreds of titles, and neither do boring text lists. The text lists are especially retarded when the indy games have the most ridiculous names ever.

What M$ should do is use that Silverlight shit to provide each game title with a quick video snippit of the gameplay. So I kind of want to see a giant page of animated thumbnails. And I want this page to be sortable, and filterable by multiple attributes like genre(s), release date(s), popularity score(s), reviews, and etc... These are GAMES, not books. I want to see pictures, preferably moving ones, and I want to see them quickly, and easily... not via shitty, clunky, buried menus and buffer screens.

Speaking of which I'm on 12mbit broadband and can stream like 5 HD furry pr0n movies while torrenting my favorite linux distro that I then burn to blu-ray and shoot at the neighborhood cats with my blu-ray gun. So what the fuck is up with such shitty Live data fetch speeds.

M$ needs to speed up its delivery of data to the menu, I hate waiting for information to pop in 10 seconds after the blank page is rendered on my screen. You (M$) always have bandwidth to feed me shit like ads, how about stuff that I actually care and WANT to see? ...lame.

So I can understand why everyone is whining about the library being crowded and making it impossible to find good games, published OR indy... 4chan is organized better.

If this is true than I really must say it's dissapointing Microsoft would go with such a dirty business model, snubbing us the gamers of decent games, in favor of pocket cash from shitty publishers and their crap games.