Thursday, June 5, 2008

XBLA Delisting - Developer Response Part 3 - Housemarque

In the second part of Developers Response to the recent changes to the Xbox Live Arcade policies, I spoke with Ilari Kuittinen - CEO of Housemarque, creators of the upcoming title Golf: Tee it up as well as Super Stardush HD on the Playstation Network.

I asked for Ilari's opinion on the changes to the policies, if he was for or against them, and what does he believe would improve the current Xbox Live Marketplace.
Ilari Kuittinen - CEO of Housemarque: "It is hard to really fully comment on the issue of removing games from the XBLA service as we don't know how many games are really fulfilling the criteria. Are there really many games that are under the threat of being delisted from the service?

"If you think of a game that is selling about 200 copies per week at $10 each, it can still create income of up to $6,000 USD per month. It may seem low, but for a small, independent developer, this is a very welcomed additional income to keep the company floating. As the digital distribution is really allowing to keep an inventory without a significant cost to the service provider, I really think that these games should be still available unless the sales have been close to zero many months.

"Rather than removing the games, the marketplace interface should be improved to include innovations from other web stores. There are many ways to improve the service. There should be an equivalent of a bargain bin in the marketplace, recommendations of other similar products available on XBLA, tell people that what other people buying a particular game have also bought or a possibility to do customer's reviews & ratings.

"Amazon.com has literally hundreds of thousands of different items available and they are happy to add more items to their lists every day rather than delisting items from their database."
Thanks again to Ilari for taking the time and effort to respond to my query.

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