Indie developer defends Microsoft

Indie developer and Castle Crashers creator The Behemoth has spoken out to defend Microsoft and its Xbox Live Arcade team. During a recent Raptr Q&A (via Beefjack), project manager Emil Ayoubkhan said the developer's relationship with the Xbox 360 maker has been pleasant.

"We have absolutely no problem with Microsoft or the XBLA team," Ayoubkhan wrote. "We love working with them, and hopefully they enjoy working with us as well. I can't speak for other devs that may have bad mouthed Microsoft in the past, but that's definitely not the company that we are."

His comments came in response to a question about if The Behemoth would form a collective with other indie developers to address the "difficult" process of getting games onto XBLA.

"There shouldn't be any collectives formed to go against anyone else," Ayoubkhan wrote. "We should all be in this together and working towards making games that are fun to play."

"You'll always hear the negative side of things in the press, or from others, more than the positive aspects," he added. "It's definitely a lot more entertaining to read I suppose."

Most recently, Braid creator Jonathan Blow lambasted Microsoft's indie developer relations policies. He told Wired that the company's stance is to "put you through as much pain as you will endure in order to extract whatever [they] feel like this week."

Blow's next game--The Witness--will be a PlayStation 4 launch title.

Retro City Rampage creator Brian Provinciano also spoke poorly of Microsoft, claiming the company canceled the release of his game after he publicly spoke about the trials of the process. He further claimed that Microsoft forced him to resubmit the game, which resulted in an extra six months' work.