“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
–Samuel Beckett
Quotes
“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured… the first thought forbidden… the first freedom denied–chains us all irrevocably.”
–Jeri Taylor, writing for the character of Captain Picard in TNG S4E21, “The Drumhead”
Ratings board certification is an aspect of the Xbox Live Indie Games mess from the current generation that I hadn’t considered until now. Andrew Groen for the PA Report:
“Legally, Microsoft couldn’t promote [Xbox Live Indie Games] due to the fact that they were not certified by the ESRB, PEGI, or other ratings board, therefore it was in the hands of the developers,” said Dave Voyles, co-organizer of the Xbox Live Indie Games Summer Uprising in 2011 and Uprising 3 in 2012. “We saw an open opportunity, took it, and I think it worked out pretty well for everyone involved.”
If there is a kernel of truth to this, it would go a long way towards explaining at least some of the policies and how they affect indie developers. And those same indie developers should be really grateful that Steam carries them at all without a ratings board certification.
(Greenlight’s messed-up-edness is something for a different post entirely. So is the ESRB as a stupid-yet-useful arm of the industry cartel.)
Customers are a big source of my emails. Anytime anyone contacts us with a question, whether it’s by email or telephone, they get a personal reply. The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I’m smoking crack. They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer emails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.
— Paul English, Kayak CTO
“So, as of this week, we have computing performance in our pants pockets that nine years ago required a professional desktop workstation.”
— John Gruber, in his review of the iPhone 5
If I stop to think about all the things I am able to do with this tiny little device I carry with me everywhere and how I would explain that to 7-year-old me, I’m sure small me would think I had just described something straight of of the then-newly-premiered Star Trek: The Next Generation.