Team Meat, the indie developer behind the popular Xbox 360 and PC title Super Meat Boy has launched an attack on Microsoft at the GDC in regards to what they say is a failure to deliver on marketing promises that Microsoft made during the games launch on Xbox LIVE Arcade.
According to Eurogamer the comments were made by Team Meat’s co-CEO Tommy Refenes at GDC 2011, who went on to state that Microsoft promised that Super Meat Boy would be the only title that was released on Xbox LIVE Arcade during the games launch week, yet during that week, Microsoft also released Double Fine’s equally excellent Halloween based title, Costume Quest. This pitted two very popular games against each other in a section that usually has single weekly releases.
Tommy Refenes went on to say that Microsoft broke another promise which would have seen Super Meat Boy appear as top-billing on the Xbox LIVE Arcade spotlight section, something that once again never happened.
Because of this, Refenes sent off an e-mail to Microsoft to ask why the game wasn’t being promoted on launch day, a few hours later the game got a promotion banner, but only at the number four position n on the spotlight feed. The game stayed at the number four spot for the entire week, while an advert for a Mazda 3 was kept at the number two spot throughout this time according to Refenes.
It seems that Microsoft then went on to tell Team Meat that the better the game sold, the more promotion it would get, but according to Refenes, despite increasing sales and high reviews, no additional marketing was ever released.
Team Meat did go on to say that working with the creative side of Microsoft is great, but that the company were very hurt by the way they were treated.