Who fancies a bit of Monday drama in Xbox land? Here at the PX offices we could take it or leave it to be honest, but the story around indie platformer HAAK is becoming more interesting by the minute - so here we are.
To try and sum things up, basically, the team behind this indie title (already released on PC, Switch & mobile) has taken to Twitter to publicly criticise Microsoft over its own ID@Xbox experience. The dev claims that it has "spent over 14 months trying to apply for game publication" without much help at all from Xbox. This has resulted in them cancelling the Xbox release of HAAK and putting out a lengthy statement on the matter.
However, this story is now firmly in the public sphere; which means plenty of eyes are now on it. First of all, the team itself has shared a private Microsoft response to the game's very public cancellation — where Xbox offers to try and help out — and then, the likes of former Xbox exec Major Nelson and Epic's Tim Sweeney have also gotten involved, with the latter even pushing for a response from Phil Spencer.
Here's what the team's initial statement had to say:
And here's the follow-up statement from last night, alongside a screenshotted email from Microsoft:
For now, we've not seen a response from Phil or any of the current Xbox exec team, but others have responded to this story with mixed thoughts. Some replies are calling out the HAAK developer for seemingly not taking up Microsoft's offer to help, while other indie devs — including BROK developer COWCAT and Aaero maker Mad Fellows — have talked about their much better experiences with the ID@Xbox team.
Anyway, as things stand, HAAK is still seemingly not coming to Xbox in the wake of all of this drama - although that could easily change in the coming days, depending on where this story goes next and what HAAK developer Blingame puts out there. It's all fun and games, eh?
How are you feeling about this as you read up on the situation? Tell us your thoughts down below.
Comments 29
For a distant-third in desperate need of games MS sure seems intent on not getting any ******* games.
Fat chance of getting a response from Phil Spencer. He has clearly been told, by those above him, to not to get involved in anything related to Xbox, other than what will likely be a very stilted appearance at Gamescom, or maybe a pre-recorded video, and regardless of anything else, he will not permitted to speak with journalists...
Welcome to Microsoft.
Never even heard of this one before. I'm sure that for every angry developer there's at least five grateful ones though.
So, first off, this seems to be an isolated incident, and not a widespread issue with tons of developers. However, these guys posted about this back in February and got essentially the same response from Microsoft then, so I understand them not being interested in any offers of help now. This looks to have been a time (and money) sink for the developer and they now have no trust in the Xbox platform. Bummer all around.
Personally, I'm going to buy this game on Steam, it looks cool and has good reviews there.
Yeah, there’s got to be more to this case. There are literally thousands of devs, some with incredibly low budget junk, that are able to get through the submission process just fine. How come they are able to do it? Is there a language barrier or something else going on? It doesn’t make sense.
I’ll laugh if Sony steps in and says “Hey, here’s a dev kit for free, enjoy!”
Haak’ed off.
This is unfortunate, the game looked like something I would have bought…
Nice of MS to offer help when this case was exposed to public and picked up by mainstream gaming media. Funny how they fiddled their fingers and ignored the team for 6 months prior..
Not even saying this is MS specific, every large company is similar (working with Apple team on publishing software can occasionally be hellish experience), but MS should at least be supportive and frictionless in these customer relation services (for platform developers are their customers) if they want to attract and keep indie devs in what is clearly a dying platform.
It's understandable because Microsoft still has legacy backend bugs on windows that can be linked to windows XP that still needs to be addressed and patched but they just look the other way these days that leads software developers to make a bug that bypasses a windows bug until they finally update the backend system & code but I suppose this is how it works when a trillion dollar company is now primarily focusing on Ai, cloud infrastructures and 365, gamepass subscriptions that also leads to everyone else waiting until later.
But the funny thing is (excluding security protocols) plenty of their machines/servers use a Linux distro so they must know how messy their operating system is 😂
And once again Microsoft ONLY got involved when the issue was mad public. Much like the Baldur's Gate 3 and parity fiasco.
Man... What happened to the corporate-counter-culture Xbox used to be. Now it is just the literal definition of corporate shenanigans.
@Rog-X Okay?
The game's actually quite good and is reviewed as such on Steam, doesn't look anything like something that would've been on the Amiga, has a unique influence of Eastern culture that you don't see every day and shouldn't have had to go through what they did in order to get their game on a platform where more people can play it - that's the main issue here, not your... frankly weird critiques that don't even land.
Would not be surprised there was behind the scenes of Microsoft pressuring developer to bring the game to game pass (since vast majority of game pass are game boy quality indie games).
The developer smartly said no, since did not want to lose sales. Microsoft then said ok, and began to make their process to release on Xbox a very long, very drawn out process.
None of that would surprise me.
Anybody who thinks that Sony won "the console war" by defeating Microsoft is deluding themselves. Microsoft have defeated themselves. They have constantly, and consistently been a overwhelming match for their own endeavours. They only have themselves to blame.
@NeutronBomb Sony makes dumb decision
MS: Hold my beer, imma top this.
@Rog-X I'm gonna take a wild guess you never had an Amiga?
Game looks perfectly fine for what it is (2D metroidvania), and I'm having trouble finding a bad review of it. I hope that this situation works in devs favor and game gets few extra sales.
Looks like Xbox needs to clean house of all the lazy workers and people doing bare minimum
I can't even get Microsoft to repair my 1.5 year old Lunar and Stellar Shift controllers because of drift. Their support site actively drives you away from contacting a human being that can help, I'm sure it's the same for all of their processes. This is sad to see. Easy solution would have been to just email the requirements & have them fill it in.
What haaks, talk about unprofessional.
@Kilamanjaro Sony sure isn't any better, their customer support is notoriously awful.
@JayJ He doesn’t need Sony to repair his Xbox controller he needs Microsoft to do it….whataboutism isn’t going to sort out his problem
Microsoft is always reactive, never proactive. It continually boggles the mind. This has to be some deep seated culture thing with the company. At least that shared Microsoft email was humble and acknowledged the issue-- if only it wasn't another r e a c t i v e response after bad PR.
@JayJ I guess I go to Microsoft for non-Xbox things too so that's what I'm getting at. Such a hassle with their support teams in general regardless if Xbox e.g. MS Office, Outlook, rewards programs, etc. I guess I don't have many other Sony products or services to give an honest opinion their support.
It's obvious any response from Microsoft would just simple be PR damage control.
@Kilamanjaro I just know it's a lot easier to get refunds for games on Xbox compared to Nintendo and especially Sony. They aren't as good as Steam, but then again nobody seems to be. I had the worst refund experiences with Sony. They make you contact their customer service, which can include an hour long wait, and you have to plea your case, and even then they will make you wait about another week while they "review" your case. No joke I tried to get a refund on a game I got that I never even downloaded or played for a solitary minute, they made me go through all the trouble and wait about a week to get a response, and then they denied my request in the end with some lame copy and pasted response telling me how they don't give refunds if I played the game (and like I said, I never even downloaded or played it once the whole time I was waiting for a response, and I sent the request the day after I bought the game).
By comparison when I got a refund for a game on Xbox, all I had to do was google the refund page, navigate to it, login, and submit my request. Whole process only took a couple minutes, and the next day I had a full refund no questions asked.
So not denying how I'm sure Microsoft can have some customer service issues, but the status of the industry can be ridiculously awful by comparison.
@JayJ that's a cool tip, I'll have to remember if I do a digital purchase, never thought I'd get a refund unless it was on Steam. My problem is with their physical controller, two have drift and they do not accept them for repairs even if I wanted to pay because they're out of warranty. Whereas for Joycons for the Switch I can ship them with a form online and get them back all in about 7-10 days. Wish they let me send it in to pay for a fix.
@Kilamanjaro I think the only reason Nintendo is being good on that is because they lost a lawsuit on stick drift since it became such a common issue with joycons. So they're legally obligated to fix them. I remember hearing how they used to be difficult with that before. Maybe people need to sue Microsoft and Sony for the same thing?
@JayJ well even with that problem you could still send in your Joycons for repair. I'd be happy to pay Microsoft. I've sent stuff to Nintendo years later & paid for fixes. It's a simple enough process, think since Xbox is a competitor they could provide the option at the very least to pay for a fix.
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