Bleszinski to console makers: 'All that red tape needs to be stripped away'

"All that red tape needs to be stripped away in order to create an ecosystem to allow for a product like Minecraft to actually happen on a console."

- A newly-independent Cliff Bleszinski explains why right now might not be the best time to be a console game developer, and why he's not jumping at the opportunity to get right back into it. "I really think we're in a massive state of turmoil," he explained. "But at the same time, people love playing games on their iPad. The PC is going through a wonderful renaissance right now." "I just want to see what happens," he said. Bleszinski's thoughts mirror those we've been hearing from our development community lately: when it comes to consoles, a lot of you are asking for more open policies and less of the "red tape" that he's referring to, both for content updates and for getting a game onto consoles at all. Sony is promising that its upcoming PlayStation 4 will be the "most open console" available but, as we found out, it seems the company was speaking more about the hardware than it was about its submission process. With the massive amount of support we're seeing for (mostly) open Android consoles like Ouya and the GameStick -- as well as some big talk from Valve about opening up Steam to be an all-inclusive API (as opposed to a submission process) -- traditional consoles may be in danger of losing content creators if they don't make it easier for developers to be let in.