Will Amnesia be available for consoles? No!

[gbee]

The reasons you are unlikely to see Amnesia ported to XBox are pretty fundamental.

First - Direct X. Amnesia, Penumbra and their next game are all based on the portable, open industry standard openGL. This allows those games to work on Windows, OSX, Linux and many other platforms. Microsoft meanwhile does not support OpenGL on the XBox, they have their own proprietary API called DirectX because they want to make it much harder for games developers to write cross-platform games. DirectX only works with Microsoft products, it's not an open standard like OpenGL. So for Frictional to support the XBox they'd have to re-write their rendering engine for DirectX doubling the work to support just one platform. They'd actually need to re-write much of the engine, the physics, the control system, the textures and shaders, everything would need to be optimised for the limited resources of the XBox.

Second - Cost. To develop games for XBox Live you must pay Microsoft for a development kit. You have no choice about this. Once your game is being sold on XBLA Microsoft get to decide how much it costs and they take a chunk of the sales, which means that all the extra work may be rewarded with a paltry income or no income at all. You are responsible for all marketing, Microsoft and XBLA make no promise to promote your game.

Third - No guarantees. Even if you've paid Microsoft for their 'kit' and ported your game to work on the XBox there is no guarantee that they will allow it onto the platform. Microsoft review and vet every game, they have _very_ strict requirements and can reject it for many reasons including it being too similar to another game they wish to promote, minor bugs or being too scary. They have the right to force changes to gameplay and content, they become the editors of your game. The review process takes months, so let's assume that they don't reject it, when you take into account the need to rewrite the engine and the review, it could take over 18 months just to get the game to market during which you'll earn nothing. Of course if they reject the game and you are unable to comply with their requested changes then you've wasted months on development and $$$ on the kit plus your other expenses.

I've barely scratched the surface in this post, the list of issues with developing for the XBox is much, much longer. Big firms can afford it and some little firms place all their eggs into one basket taking on the risk (most indie games firms rarely survive their first game). The question is whether it's worth all the work, hassle, money and risks to port Amnesia to XBox when it's clear that everyone in here asking for an XBox port already has a PC they can play the game on?