Team Meat describe nightmare Xbox development: "everyone should love on Steam"

Team Meat have been outlining the very different experiences they had developing Super Meat Boy for Xbox and PC. They described the stresses and disappointments of getting their game ready for release on Xbox Live in a recent GDC panel, calling the experience a "mind fuck." The Steam release a month later, however, was a very different story.

The two man development team led a blow by blow account of their Xbox Live experience in their GDC appearance. They explained that Microsoft led them to believe that their best chance of success would be to release as part of Microsoft's Game Feast promotion on Xbox Live. The pair then went into crunch mode, working seven days a week on five hours of sleep to make the deadline, only to find on release day that their game hadn't gone up at all.

Half the day passed before Super Meat Boy made it onto the Xbox Live Marketplace, but then failed to appear in the Spotlight section normally reserved for new releases. While the game sold fairly well initially, thanks to a discount, sales increased dramatically through word of mouth.

A month later, Super Meat Boy was released through Steam, selling more in two weeks than their total sales on Xbox Live. Speaking at GDC, one half of Team Meat, Tommy Refenes said "It's much easier to update and everyone should just love on Steam. Like, hot nasty love all over it."

Team Meat have since released extra characters and updates for the PC version of the game, and are planning to add a level editor and a level sharing portal soon.

[via Joystiq ]

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.