Why deprecate Xbox export out of C3?

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  • construct.net/en/tutorials/using-xbox-live-uwp-apps-3

    How do most if any C2/3 creators make a living income if not for consoles? My games are always too big in GB to fit under the archaic 100MB limit of phone games (unless they finally upped that limit by now, with how many GB smartphones hold these days, but a quick search suggests it's only gone up to 200MB for those of us who can't code to somehow include 'additional assets' without a tutorial that makes it easy--maybe one that C3 can write up for us?), plus people are used to phone games being free and ad-supported, and I'm not sure if ads alone lead to the big bucks.

    I said this many times before, but I think C3 should embrace consoles, not run away from them. My current hope now is the handheld Steam Deck. (Which runs C3 games so fast and smoothly that I actually have to slow down aspects of my game--that I based on how slowly it ran in Preview--that are actually too fast on the Deck! Which is of course a good thing. And, no size limits for games to load up! As long as internal storage has at least a few GB free.) Assuming I have no issues with players happening upon my game in the Steam store without knowing it exists. Theoretically even online multiplayer would work on Steam, something I gave up on long ago because it wasn't allowed on Xbox's Creators Collection.

    I think C3 should aim to be a console game creator. Think about it: At least Xbox games are possible on C3. Why deprecate what little console ability C3's export has? It's true that in my experience the total game size shouldn't exceed about 250 MB to run on Xbox (or else you get the infinite red loading bar even without preloading sounds) but at least it's a popular console for selling smaller games on. Why not at the very least keep Xbox/UWP going? Even if it [may be] impossible to increase the runnable size.

    I also before wondered if C3 could make a deal with another company, such as Game Maker Studio or Unity, to allow C2/3 games to be imported into their software just for the sake of taking advantage of their ability to export to Xbox/PS/Switch. "Made with Construct3 & Unity".

    I've always been a console guy from a young age, plus as I said my serious games are GBs in size. I hope Steam and especially the Steam Deck can finally be the answer for making a livable income making games.

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  • We've recently added back Xbox support. The extent we can support it depends largely on console makers. IIRC the original Xbox support was deprecated because Microsoft dropped support for it. Support is essential to ensure things keep working - keeping using unsupported software means risking waking up one day and suddenly it's all permanently broken and Microsoft won't provide any support and everyone's projects and game launches are ruined. (The same rationale is behind the Addon SDK v2 - addons using unsupported features risk the same thing in Construct itself; experienced developers know not to go anywhere near anything that risks that level of disaster, and that's the same thinking behind not trying to use unsupported Xbox technologies, no matter how important it might be for the product.) In my view it's better for us to say we don't support it either than try to keep using it with that risk hanging over us. IIRC it also used the legacy Internet Explorer browser engine, which we dropped support for years ago, so we wouldn't have been able to keep supporting it until now anyway.

    The new Xbox support is based on WebView2 which is based on the Chromium browser engine. From my tests the technology works great. The main issue is it only works in UWP and Microsoft have restrictions on how you can publish UWP games. I don't know why they have those restrictions and I don't know if they plan to change it. It would be best for anyone interested in Xbox publishing to contact Microsoft about that directly as it's entirely out of our control.

    Supporting other consoles has been extensively discussed in the past, but in summary, if console makers provide something like WebView2, it is fairly easy for us to support; if they don't, it is extremely difficult to support and so far I don't think it is feasible for us to do it. Xbox has WebView2 but only for UWP, and as far as I'm aware (NDAs make it harder to tell), PlayStation and Switch do not have anything equivalent. The status quo is using third-party porting companies converting Construct games to console, which is probably the best we can do for the time being without support for web technologies on consoles.

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