More Clueless XBLA Decisions

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Rob Remakes

XBox Live - What in fucks name are Microsoft playing at?

The latest interview published with Marc Whitten, general manager of XBox Live is quite frankly, fucking scary.

There’s been a lot of complaints over Microsofts recent handling of one of the Xbox360′s greatest assets and rightly so. The decision to cut royalty rates is a poor one, especially given the cost of getting your game through cert. The rumoured handling of potential arcade releases another. The colossal fuckwittery of the current interface for browsing games (and as a knock on effect – sustaining sales of a game) the icing on the cake.

But hey, fear not because just when you think they can’t possibly fuck something up more…

“…we will be delisting older underperforming titles in order to keep the service focused on a section of high quality games”

Sounds worrying, doesn’t it? Especially if you’re an indie developer. You stump up your multiple grand in Earth money to develop and get your game pushed through cert and on the service and say, for example, you’re the creator of a quirky game… one that might just polarise critics… what happens?

“The way it will work is that the title will need to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service. This way titles are not just considered if they are not selling well or not getting good reviews, but actually a combination of both. We will also give a three-month notice before delisting any title. “

You’ve got a six month window to perform well in both critical (well, meta-critical) and sales or it’s bye bye from the service. Now, lets just fucking pause for a second here. Digital distribution, right? These games aren’t taking up shelf space are they? Isn’t this a bit like iTunes saying you can only buy the past six months “top rated by 40 or so music press publications” albums before the music disappears?

Let’s have a look at the Metacritic XBLA titles <65% (courtesy of Harsin on RLLMUK)

235 Robotron: 2084 2006 65
236 Bankshot Billiards 2 2005 65
237 Feeding Frenzy 2006 65
238 Dig Dug 2006 65
240 Ms. Pac-Man 2007 65
245 Gauntlet 2005 65
246 Crystal Quest 2006 64
247 Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe 2007 64
251 Hardwood Hearts 2005 64
255 Texas Hold ‘em 2006 63
257 Fatal Fury Special 2007 63
259 Contra 2006 63
260 Marathon: Durandal 2007 63
261 Triggerheart Exelica 2008 63
263 Missile Command 2007 63
264 Time Pilot 2006 63
265 Track & Field 2007 63
266 Hardwood Backgammon 2005 62
269 Hardwood Spades 2005 62
270 Pac-Man 2006 62
272 Frogger 2006 62
273 Mad Tracks 2007 62
277 Root Beer Tapper 2007 61
280 Super Contra 2007 61
287 Geon: Emotions 2007 59
288 Soltrio Solitaire 2007 59
291 Arkadian Warriors 2007 59
292 TiQal 2008 58
294 Rush’n Attack 2007 58
296 Aegis Wing 2007 58
297 Defender 2006 58
298 Rocketmen: Axis of Evil 2008 57
299 Double Dragon 2007 57
301 Xevious 2007 56
303 Gyruss 2007 56
309 Asteroids / Asteroids Deluxe 2007 55
311 Battlestar Galactica 2007 55
314 Centipede & Millipede 2007 55
317 Boogie Bunnies 2008 54
318 Spyglass Board Games 2007 54
321 Brain Challenge 2008 54
323 Tetris Splash 2007 53
327 Ecco the Dolphin 2007 53
330 Battlezone 2008 52
332 Tetris Evolution 2007 52
337 Yie Ar Kung-Fu 2007 51
340 Wing Commander Arena 2007 51
341 Novadrome 2006 50
348 Shrek-N-Roll 2007 49
352 Mr. Driller Online 2008 48
353 Scramble 2006 47
354 Tempest 2007 47
357 Street Trace: NYC 2007 45
359 Discs of Tron 2008 44
360 TotemBall 2006 44
362 Word Puzzle 2007 44
363 New Rally-X 2006 43
365 Tron 2008 43
367 Bliss Island 2008 42
368 Cyberball 2072 2007 41
370 Screwjumper! 2007 40
375 Rocky and Bullwinkle 2008 37
380 Yaris 2007 17

Obviously, I have no idea of conversion rates on these titles – but it’s a scary, scary big list as it stands. Over 60 games potentially up for delisting, some of which despite meta-critic ratings I’ve actually bought. Because, get this, I like the games. The major sell of XBLA for me is the variety and if I fancy picking up RezHD, I can. If I fancy Scramble (sorry, I buy Scramble for everything…) then I can have it.

Under Marc Whitten’s new initiative, I’ve got six months then another three to purchase the games… and fuck knows what happens to my purchases if they get delisted. Can you redownload HexicHD if you delete it off your drive? (short answer… not without jumping through hoops at tech support).

So, you’re fucking the developers up the arse and the consumers. Which might be forgiveable if it weren’t for a lot of the problems with XBLA lying firmly at the feet of MS and their idiotic dashboard, the handing over of release slots to big publishers for shovelware… basically, square peg meet round hole to solve a problem. Quick! Look over there!

It looks like someone doesn’t understand the positive and wonderful points of the service that XBLA provides to the consumer.

“… I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games”

Thanks Marc. You’ve missed the point by a country fucking mile, Sir. Whilst I welcome the ability to provide larger, more immersive games I don’t want this at the expense of smaller, “different” stuff. Your focus should be this: providing great games however large or small. Just. Great. Games.

The thing is, there’s a beauty in human nature that we all have differing tastes. Something that Metacritic fails to reflect with its small cross section and meta-analysis of scores, there isn’t a statistical mechanism devised yet that can cope with the myriad of tastes we all have. However, offering the consumer as much choice as possible from a wide spectrum of gaming… well, that’s preferable and nothing but good business, surely? Something for everyone, something for *anyone*. Especially when you’ve already got a near perfect mechanism in place to do this (short of, yes, sorting out the dashboard!)

It’s worth noting at this point that Space Giraffe, one of the greatest games I’ve ever been blessed with playing received a Metacritic ranking of 68 barely scraping itself out of the danger zone.

I’m off for a little cry.

UPDATE: Apparantly, the word is so far that games will be recoverable once “delisted” but no word as to whether they’ll still be able to purchase. It sounds like “no” to the latter.

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  • http://www.the2bears.com the2bears

    This is an incredibly “marketing” driven decision, and makes no sense at all to me. There’s virtually no cost to having a game available for download (assuming it’s already there and gone through their QA process). So why not make games easier to find?

    As long as someone wants to buy it, or might want to buy it in the future, why limit our choice? You end up creating nothing more than a virtual “big box” store, like the bookstores over here where all you can buy are the latest Harry Potter novels, or the latest Grisham thingy. Downloadable content is supposed to offer something for everyone, even if the proverbial marketing man thinks it too niche or eccentric.

    Bill

  • oddbob

    Yup, that’s what I find so shocking about it, Bill. It makes no sense at all as a solution to the problems XBLA has lumbered itself with.

    The problems are clear that there’s little quality control *where it counts* and the dashboard is next to useless for browsing anything that isn’t in the “featured” section or new, and getting increasingly more cumbersome with every set of releases.

    I’d have thought the correct answer would be simple. Sort the fucking dashboard out!

    But if MS are desperate to have a cull based on metacritic ratings and conversion rates then 65% metacritic and/or 6% conversion is way, way too fucking high a figure to toy with.

    The conversion rate counter is even more disturbing when you figure how weighted against the developer that actually is.

    Every Wednesday, I get the latest releases automatically downloaded to my 360 and I’ll try them all. There’s a 50/50 chance of me having any points handy and lying around but it’s something new and different to toy with. Heck, I even tried Bliss Island and that was never going to happen in a million years ;)

    So for every demo I try and don’t purchase (say 1-3 a week, release schedule depending) that’s 1 conversion the developer loses simply because I have automatic downloads turned on and try everything.

    This makes XBLA *itself* actively work against the developers in keeping their heads above water. If I didn’t download and didn’t try the game, the game would have more chance of staying afloat.

    What sort of fuckwit business model is this to run with?

    * Punishing the customer with less choice

    * Using the notoriously PR led games press to decide whether a game survives.

    * Abusing a mechanism that’s in place to make delivery to the end user of a developers title as smooth as possible to effect the end outcome of whether a title lives or dies on XBLA. Not deliberate, but a side effect certainly.

    * Expecting developers to stump up a not exactly small amount of money for game development with a vastly increased amount of risk – knowing all the time that if they don’t perform well enough then once delisted, there’s NO chance of recovery.

    Given it’s taken MS 3 years to sort out a DRM issue with XBLA and it’s recent record with Playforsure music, I’m not exactly trusting when it comes to feeling that any game I download won’t be delisted and recoverable well within the consoles life span.

    I expect this at the end of a consoles life span, not when it’s really hit its stride.

  • http://ravuya.com ravuya

    The whole thing strikes me as some sort of major sea-change in XBLA. I remember the initial rush where every major publisher announced some derivative crap to plug a release schedule, since they were “easy” to make and had a relatively high rate of return.

    I’d much rather have a large set of small, cheap eccentric games mixed in with utterly terrible ports rather than a small set of great ‘epic’ games. Seems wrong to be dropping $25 on a Live Arcade game. I assume that the “quirky” games will be moving to the XNA creators’ club support, but I have no idea how well that will work out for people like Jeff and Giles who have dropped a ton of cash on cert.

    This is a problem that has a technical solution; the solution proposed by Whitten is undoubtedly going to be messier than just sitting down and fixing the UI. The only thing I can think of is that they’re deliberately “corporatizing” XBLA to improve the positioning of the XNA CC games.

  • oddbob

    Rav, I’d considered your last point (inbetween almost inhuman levels of fuming) whilst typing out my post, but if you weigh up where the shovelware is generally coming from it makes even less sense.

    The majority of the utter toss on XBLA is from the majors and the less said about the diversion into advergaming that was Yaris the better.

    It is going to hit the risk takers harder though, and that’s the sad thing. A small studio or indie can’t afford to absorb the loss in the same way that a major can and as has been shown (and in your own post) they shovelled shite out because it was quick and easy and they could *afford* to. I don’t see that changing for the forseeable future either.

    I can’t see how lessening the impact of XBLA, what should be an absolute flagship service, in order to make way for XNA CC members games makes either service appear in a better light. Both can quite happily co-exist on the same service under different tabs I’d have thought.

    Frustrating stuff, because I can almost see the glint of foolish logic behind these decisions but they’re so far removed from sense that it chafes.

  • John H

    Seems to me this ought to be a branding issue more than anything else. You don’t want your ‘XBLA’ brand tainted with shovelware? Then make up another brand, put it in a new menu (aka fix the dashboard), and put the shovelware there. Just as ‘Game Demos’ is a different ‘brand’ to ‘Arcade’ right now.

    Space Giraffe’s a funny example, because as much as I love it, and you love it, most people don’t get it, and it hasn’t sold well. A traditional salesman might see it as wasting ‘shelf space’ because they’ve not got used to the fact that shelf space is now almost free. Yet it is a feather in XBLA’s hat: a demonstration that XBLA can support original ideas for niche gamers. Of course it would be a better demonstration if Llamasoft had got a decent return for their work on it :(

    These guys need to read up on the Long Tail.

  • http://www.bruceongames.com/ Bruceongames

    This does look like a misguided effort to sweep out what they probably see as the “rubbish”.
    However game quality is entirely subjective so even Socket: Time Dominator and International Rugby Challenge have some merit.
    It costs effectively nothing to host all XBLA content for all eternity, so they should do it. The real problem here is the terrible Live dashboard. If Amazon can get it right with an immense catalogue of products then why can’t Microsoft with a comparatively miniscule catalogue?

  • http://www.zee-3.com/pickfordbros Ste Pickford

    Great rant there oddbob. Totally agree with you.

    This seems like a completely wrong-headed solution to the real problem of the very poor user interface for XBLA.

    One of the big attractions of indie developing / self publishing over the internet (and I’m counting XBLA as part of the internet) is that although prices are lower, and sales are lower, at least your game remains on sale for more than the month or so that most games get at retail.

    Hype free games (which most indie games are) at least get the chance to work on word of mouth, or a slow trickle of sales over many years, particularly if they satisfy a niche. MS have just nixed this idea completely for XBLA.

  • Aubrey

    Every time XBLA manages to lower itself in my esteem (and I’m surprised at how regularly it does this), a quote appears in my head: “XBLA is going to be like the Sundance Film Festival of Games” – Peter Moore.

    Good one Pete. I actually believed you for a while.

    Here is a pun which is so dreadfully bad that I had to include it, even after thinking better of it:

    Rather than Sundance, it’s looking more like “Cannes” now (In that your game can get canned. Even after it’s finished and released).

  • http://www.bruceongames.com/ Bruceongames

    It is amazing that Microsoft are prepared to destroy their own heritage in this way. It is the same as burning books.

  • oddbob

    Blimey Bruce, I’d completely forgotten Socket: Time Dominator existed. Probably with good reason too. I think the last time I saw it mentioned was on Gamesetwatch a few years back filed under “games you’d never heard of” or somesuch.

    I know you’re a massive advocate of online authentication/digital distribution. I take it I’m safe to assume that this isn’t something you’d have expected a company to pull with a framework (insert usual dash caveat here) so robust and installed in so many homes?

    John, it’s an odd one considering they recently put the “Arcade classics” section in place. They already have space for, for want of a better phrase, “out of season” games. Of course, I have no idea whether reducing the price on the titles had any drastic impact on the sales of the titles filed there or not but at least a demotion or price reduction is better than a complete wipe out. The option still remains to purchase/redownload/earn some money from.

    The mechanism is clearly already in place. Why not just use that to file stuff off elsewhere if they want it away from the main dash?

    As for SG, I still live in hope that it’ll do an It’s A Wonderful Life and somewhere down the line folks will be able to get it. Although yuss, I think me, Ste and half the internet managed to finger why it didn’t achieve all it deserved to. Hopefully the forthcoming PC version may shift things along a notch or two.

    Ste, I agree – one of the beauties of the shareware game is that not just months but years later you can still shift titles. I’m sure Jeff still gets the odd trickle of GR++ sales, Edgar Vidal still shifts copies of Warblade and that’s pushing on 3 years old now and I can’t see Popcap reaching a dead stop in sales of their older titles anytime soon. Even if things do dry up totally for periods of time, there’s still the chance of a rise in sales or someone casually toddling along having been told of a game. It’s the principle I thought at least until the end of the 360′s lifespan, MS would have the sense to follow.

    Aubrey my man, never waste a pun! It’s a shame to see XBLA falling down in your esteem as I’m still convinced that if there’s one person on this planet who *could* do great things given the correct mystical planetary alignment and appropriate life/time/circumstances, it’s you. Of course, I completely understand *why* it’d drop in your esteem of late. I know that if MS do follow through with this plan verbatim then I’d be incredibly wary of raising the cash, time and effort to develop an XBLA game.

    K2 is sounding very interesting btw ;)

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