Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Evil Avatar has posted that the latest 1Up Yours podcast features an interview with Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games. In the interview he says that they have more maps ready to go out the door for Gears of War, and that they’ve wanted to give them away for free, but Microsoft is pushing back, insisting that they sell them instead, which has held up the maps in limbo.

A number of extremely clueless people have posted in the comments that they should just post the maps and tell Microsoft to go soak.

Folks, you have to understand something. Console online networks are like cell phone networks (and soon, cable and DSL provider networks). Nothing gets on them without the owner’s say-so.

If Gears of War were on an open platform like the PC, Epic would be free to do whatever they wanted with additional content. Sell it, make a Steam-like subscription engine for it, maybe sell one map and give two away with it. Whatever they want. But on closed networks like the console online services, they are beholden to the network owner.

Hint: You are not the owner.

Folks waiting for Gears to show up on the PC still probably wouldn’t be able to get free content the way the XBox Live gamers can’t. Why? Because in case you haven’t noticed, Xbox Live is coming to PC, and you can bet every last royalty payment from Gears of War that the contract they signed to have Microsoft publish it requires it be locked up on that network too.

I wouldn’t be surprised that part of the deal for any game to be online playable on the 360 would include contract clauses requiring it to use Games For Windows Live for any PC versions, including selling add-ons and such through that. Will we ever see contract terms like that? No, I’m sure those are locked behind NDA. But it would make perfect sense, wouldn’t it?

Via EvilAvatar. Image from Wikipedia