Microsoft have a bit of a reputation for not being wonderfully indie-friendly with their consoles, a reputation they’ve been trying to change recently. However, there are some suggestions that they still have quite a ways to go.

A few months ago they neglected to pay some indie developers who had published their games on the Xbox Live Indie Games Market their rightful share of the revenue from sales. They give themselves a fairly lengthy 45 days before payment can be considered ‘late’ and they exceeded that by about a week before those developers got paid. And now, it’s happened again but this time it’s already 19 days late. Oh dear.

To sum up what should happen, the Market was meant to be a self-publishing option. Games are passed by peer review, allowed to be sold on the system and each quarter Microsoft pay the developers their portion of the money taken. The quarter concerned here is the Q3 one, which was due to be paid September 30th. Although developers were told that payment might be a few days late, at this stage quite a few of the developers are rightfully beginning to ask where their money is. There’s even rumours that similar payment issues are taking place for developers of apps and games for Windows Phones.

Even speaking to developers on our Indie Game Show, we know that Microsoft was not doing enough to attract the developers to release games on their consoles, and with this on top of the parity policy that means indie games need to release first on Xbox One or release at the same time across all platforms you have to wonder how Microsoft is hoping to improve their reputation among the Indie community.

Microsoft have released a public statement calling this incident an “unfortunate error” and saying that they are working hard to resolve it and get the money to the developers who are missing it.

 

Enclosed is an official statement and apology from Microsoft on the Xbox Live Indie Games for Xbox 360 payment issue pic.twitter.com/FJJ2hqqffG

— ID@Xbox (@ID_Xbox) December 3, 2014