Over at GameSetWatch Tadhg Kelly, who has previously worked with Lionhead studios and Climax Studios, has written up a fantastic opinion piece on the current changes to the Xbox Live Arcade.The piece brings up a lot of good points about what this will cause developers to consider when they're now making games for the service. A definite read.
Click here for the article - "Opinion: Aggregation Vs Portals: Where Microsoft Is Going Wrong With Xbox Live"
On another note, Aaron Greenberg had a chat with MTV Multiplayer Blog about how the "Negative reaction to XBLA delisting policies was their fault". Some choice quotes:
“The reality is we’re not removing any games from the service, if you will. They’ll always be there for purchase. Think about a book on Amazon. It’s not always going to be featured on the front page of the store.”These two quotes contradict each other. On one had he says the games will be available for purchase, on the other he uses a retailer analogy of cleaning shelves, but once its not a shelf, its not available for purchase.
“We’re sort of cleaning our shelves as a retailer,” he explained. “Even though we are in this digital age, the pros of cleaning the shelves outweighed the cons of expanding the shelf. ”
New users don't have friend lists, especially those in the casual game space. People right now don't even user the "Tell a friend" feature. Right now it's sounding more and more like they're making bad excuses for an outright terrible idea.
Check out that article over at the MTV Multiplayer blog.
