Microsoft doesn’t have the best reputation in the indie gaming community. They didn’t have many fans before eliminating self-publishing on the Xbox One at the console’s announcement and subsequent reversal. They aren’t going to win any more with the latest scandal.

A number of developers on the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace have come out to say that Microsoft is late with their third quarter payments by over two weeks.

As part of the XBLIG self-publishing program, Microsoft is obliged to remit the developers’ portion of sales quarterly. Microsoft has allowed themselves up to 45 days following the quarter-end to pay the developers. For the third-quarter of 2014, that would give Microsoft until November 15th to pay developers their share of sales from July 1st to September 30th.

According to indie developers Freelance Games and Bootdisk Revolution, Microsoft hadn’t paid their Q3 money as of December 3rd. Not only did Microsoft go over the 45 day remittance allowance but they went over it by nearly 20 more days.

Microsoft’s Independent Developer Publishing Program issued a statement claiming that a technical issue with the payment system that some developers hadn’t been paid for the third quarter. Their statement also says that developers would receive their payments inside the next two weeks.

I’m not going to pretend to understand how their payment system suddenly failed and how it took a community article on Destructoid to figure out that there was a problem but at least it was brought to light and is seemingly being dealt with. On the other hand, this reportedly isn’t the first time that Microsoft has been late with payments either. That same Destructoid article claims that Microsoft previously paid devs some seven days late.

If anything comes of this, besides the developers getting paid, it’s that Microsoft has to re-examine their XBLIG payments system. Late payments shouldn’t be happening in the first place. Late payments happening twice says that they have some issues that need working on.

Source: Destructoid