Indie dev survey: how easy is it to develop for each platform?

A survey of over 200 independent developers, done by the people behind the critically acclaimed indie title World Of Goo, shows some interesting statistics about what indie devs think about various platforms and how easy it is to develop for them.

Unsurprisingly, Steam, Facebook, and the Mac App Store are the top 3, respectively, but there are a few bits that might be interesting to some: the Xbox Live Arcade is right at the bottom, with the only platform consistently voted harder to develop for being cell phone carriers.

You can see a chart of the results here.◊

edited 4th Oct '11 12:19:53 PM by Zennistrad

I thought the PS 3 would be at the bottom, given all the complaints that the big-name devs have with using Sony's hardware, and that Xbox would be near the top since they were the ones who started the whole craze. At least I guessed right about Steam...

XBLA is unsurprising. Consider the story of Monday Night Combat.

I wonder why XBLA is so low. Executive Meddling?

Basically their rating/checking over system or something is really prohibitive and buggers up release dates and you HAVE to charge - you can't just give stuff away.

Even Valve had problems with the money-grabbkng arseholes at Microsoft so it's not hard to see how indies would struggle.

Like I said, just ask anyone at Uber Entertainment about Microsoft.

Tgis is said as an Xbox gamer.