Indie developers find Microsoft “excruciating” to work with, according to survey

Microsoft’s Xbox Live certification is widely infamous for its loops and hoops, and now it seems independent developers, the heart and soul of the Xbox Live Arcade community, has had enough of it.

According to a survey posted at indie developer 2D Boy, more and more developers are now opting to release their games on PSN over Xbox Live. Participants were made to rate platforms on the basis of how easy or hard it was develop for; 48% of participating developers rated XBLA as “excruciating” to work on, with 33% as “difficult”, and 0% as “very easy”. PSN fared far better, with 52% of developers rating the platform as “so-so” difficult to work with, while only 14% finding it “excruciating”.

The top rankers on the survey were Valve, Facebook and Apple, with a majority of developers finding the platforms “very easy” to work on.

2D Boy, who clearly has been through Xbox Live’s certification processes, also doled out pointers to Microsoft on how it can create a workable environment for developers. One of the points urges Microsoft to drop its exclusivity deal, and focus on creating a better content discovery system, while also decreasing developer frustration with a “fair contract”.

It’s a rather long and informative article, have a read here.