Moving forward after his first game, Braid, became the top rated Xbox Live Arcade game and one of the top 10 highest rated Xbox 360 games, Jon Blow said that his upcoming "The Witness" won't be released on XBLA, simply because its certification process is a "pain in the ass."
"I think the thing that they don't understand -- between that [requiring an exclusive period] and the cert stuff that they do -- they just kind of make themselves a pain in the ass," he said. "For a big game, for a triple-A game that costs 60 bucks, and has a giant budget and all these people working on it, the amount extra that that pain in the ass adds is not that much."
"But if you make an XBLA game, the amount of bullshit that adds is gigantic. It can take a third to a half of the effort required to build your game, in some cases, and I don't think that they understand that. I don't think that they understand that, at least for that size of game, they're competing very heavily with Steam and iOS for developer mindshare."
"I can live a comfortable life, and just put my game on Steam without that much of a hassle, or I can have the XBLA business people dick me around and give me asshole contracts that I need to spend three months negotiating back to somewhere reasonable, that they knew," he added. "And then have all these arguments with them and go through this horrible cert process. It's like, at some point, the question 'Why should I do that?' arises."
