Comments on: That sales thing…

By: HeelTaker

HeelTaker — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 02:21:57 +0000

Exactly, you would only use it if you had the space, which a lot more people have these days, and the want, which a lot of CG enthusiasts would with the multitude of titles and more and more coming all the time.

I never suggested it should be mandatory.

It should just be there for the (tonnes of) people who want to use it.

By: oddbob

oddbob — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:05:15 +0000

And by you, I mean a nebulous you, of course. Not anyone personally

By: oddbob

oddbob — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:35:09 +0000

But the CC isn’t meant to be a place where you can get on the 360 bypassing cert fees etc… which is what you’re essentially attempting if trying to make a game on a large budget for it. That’s XBLA market stuff and that’s got its own fair share of problems for getting a ROI (see Si Carless’ GDC talk for some educated but likely not far from accurate guesses).

If folks barrelled in expecting a gold mine and a way to get themselves set up whilst avoiding the costs of the big daddy service and then didn’t get that, that’s not necessarily a problem with the system. More one of perception (and not on the customers part).

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:07:40 +0000

Well, Braid would take around 100k in costs to make (ie. a pro level programmer/artist working for the time that they were working on it). That’s the case with many “great” niche games. And when you’re returning 30k at BEST on a service, well, that’s just not a feasible investment.

You might get a labor of love from a college kid or someone with enough income that he can spend 12 hours a day working on a game instead of, well, working, but for the most part, you’re going to get the smaller, flawed titles that people keep complaining about, just because that’s all that’s feasible to make on there. And that’s the chicken/egg situation that we run into.

By: oddbob

oddbob — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:01:03 +0000

I’m with Ste Pickford on this that NXE opening straight to adverts instead of “my Xbox stuffage” is pretty brazenly offensive.

By: nrXic

nrXic — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:56:04 +0000

I think you’re right. Also considering that MS has yet to advertise XBLA, which I think they should have been doing years ago…they would have to address that before advertising XBCG.

Apple has done an excellent job promoting their app store. To the point where my 360 owning friends (95% of which are not aware of XBCG to begin with, and 80% are not aware of XBLA) know all about it despite not owning the iPhone or iPod Touch.

XBLA’s library is diverse and full of high quality content, enough to warrant a marketing push. Pretty soon, XBCG will get to that point.

I have faith though. There will be a day where XBCG gets a game like fl0w, Flower, Braid, etc. An artsy game that is unconventional but appreciated. The day that occurs, the mainstream gaming media will jump on it and provide a lot of advertising for the service.

By: oddbob

oddbob — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:52:21 +0000

From 17 million total Live! users, there’s an average attach rate of 6 or 7 games for XBLA (last figures I could find, if there’s any new or updated I’d love it if folks could link me up to them). That’s a good attach rate but it’s also good for putting things in perspective.

This isn’t a technical problem, folks. You can advertise the hell out of things on the dash, put a button on the dash in big neon letters etc…, it’ll help a bit – but it’s not going to counter the fact that only 70% of Xbox 360 owners use Live and have downloaded an arcade game (an being the operative word here).

It won’t make most of the issues go away.

For that, you’re going to have to institute a change in peoples attitudes and that, really truly, is out of MS hands. If they can’t make everyone buy incredibly large amounts of XBLA games, they certainly can’t do it for Pong. And that’s where developers have to pick up the reigns and get out there, promoting stuff.

For a niche within a niche within a niche, which is precisely what the CG is, and more so for a completely untried and untested market – these figures are excellent.

By: fog

fog — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:12:38 +0000

I can’t believe how bad NXE is considering all the hype it generated. Its sole purpose seems to be to thrust as many adverts in my face as possible (not Community Games ones obviously) at the expense of usability.

It’s strange that these adverts are constantly updated and appear instantly, yet my games list, stuff already sitting on my machine, takes so long to populate.

Priorities eh.

By: Pandapadawan

Pandapadawan — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:44:09 +0000

That’s what I don’t understand. They obviously are putting in more money for support and the whole Creator’s Club than they currently can get back by selling premium memberships and community games. So why would they want to spend money on it but not want to advertise it? I don’t think it’s got something to do with pressure from XBLA developers. Almost all developers so far are complaining about the way XBLA works, that MS has too much power, they have no idea when their games will be released, there’s an extra long waiting queue, Microsoft decides prices and takes a big share in revenues … the list goes on and on. If you’re on XBLA you’re pretty much a pawn, so no way do developers put pressure on Microsoft not to promote CG.

Maybe they see it as some kind of open beta at the moment, they simply don’t want everybody to come here until they ironed out the bugs and flaws in the system. Maybe they are aware of the quality problem. After all if you spend money on bringing new customers to CG and they leave due to the quality you probably will never ever get them back. It’s all about first impressions. So my guess is that they will continue to enhance useability and accessability of CG and once those things are working they’ll start to advertise. Automatic update messages (not automatic updates, which is a good thing, see below) and ratings will be the next steps.

So why are automatic updates not a good thing for CG? Because of the design of Xbox 360. Any 360 can only store 3 updates at once. When you start the 4th game the oldest update is deleted (if of course there’s an update available for the game). With the overall shorter game time of CG you would be asked for an update pretty much every couple of minutes. And that would be much more annoying than having to download the game again.

By: Pandapadawan

Pandapadawan — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:23:41 +0000

And that’s the least of my problems. If I want to download stuff I can go to xbox.com and it’s way faster than the Live marketplace. The thing that annoys me the most is how long it takes to populate the “My Games” list. With 120+ XBLA/XBLCG games I have to wait 30+ seconds whenever I exit a game and want to start a new game. For XBLA there is a workaround, simply press the Guide and enter the quick launch list, your newest XBLA games are there. But CG aren’t. Obviously the 360 was never designed with such a big library in mind, there’s absolutely no caching, everything has to be loaded from the start.

The marketplace suffers from something similar but yet totally different. It could be super fast – but then it wouldn’t be able to tell you which games you already bought. Actually that’s the way it was when NXE was released but people were complaining why they were told that they had to pay 800 points again and so Microsoft threw in the quick n dirty fix that now checks your complete download history before drawing the marketplace. And there too is no caching involved, so everytime you go to the marketplace the process repeats and with every download your history gets longer and the whole process of browsing through the marketplace gets slower. But I guess these are things that won’t be fixed for Xbox 360, we’ll have to wait for the next generation. Xbox Live became much more of a success than Microsoft ever anticipated, they designed their download histories with a marketplace of a couple of thousand downloadable items in mind. Now we’re already at 100,000+ items.