Prison Architect has broken free onto Early Access; here’s our Prison Architect review.
Microsoft and Sony can “piss off” if they think they’re getting the first bite of Introversion’s indie apple, slammed co-founder Mark Morris. Speaking to VG247, the indie dev slammed the prohibitive development costs of creating games for consoles, as well as the diminishing returns of exclusive content deals with platform holders. Slam slam slam.
Introversion are currently working on Prison Architect, which I’ve fallen into the habit of describing as Dwarf Fortress meets Prison Break. The development team are aiming for an eventual Steam release, Morris states, if only to sidestep the huge costs involved in developing for Xbox 360.
“We need to pay Microsoft $10,000 a go for a development kit,” reveals Morris. “It’s ridiculous, and it’s non-refundable once you’ve bought it. You’ve got to pay – I think our quality assurance bill was $30,000 for testing with Darwinia+, and it took four years to get the game certified to a standard that Microsoft wanted. It then sold rubbish. We hardly shipped any units on Xbox 360, compared to PC.”
Morris also took aim at the practice of securing exclusivity deals with platform holders, as well asdescribing Microsoft and Sony as “second class customers” of independent developers.
“We’re on PC because [Microsoft and Sony have]made it too hard,” said Morris. “Also, they want exclusive content, well piss off.You’re not delivering the amount of sales, you’re making us work harder, and ultimately we’re getting paid less than what we do on PC. So I think they’re definitely – in the indie world – second class customers.”
Prison Architect’s just turned over a cool $360k in revenue on PCthis month. That’s enough forthirty six development kits.You can take part in thePrison Architect paid alpha over on the game’s website.