[Edit: The article has changed to reflect the response by the Gamerscore blog]
Today NextGen.Biz, in a very casual interview with Marc Whitten - general manager of Xbox Live, some big and frankly frightening news was announced about the lifespan of titles on the Xbox Live Arcade.
In the interview, Mr. Whitten tells NextGen that "... in addition to allowing these bigger and better games we will be delisting older under performing titles in order to keep the service focused on a section of high quality games.".
For a game to actually be delisted, a game requires "... to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service."
In my opinion, this is a bad, bad move. For one, it changed the entire process of the Xbox Live Arcade.
This isn't a matter of not enough space - the Xbox Live Arcade is minuscule compared to either the Video Marketplace, Demos, DLC or Game Videos. This is a based on sale numbers - most likely dreamt up by the Xbox marketing collective - wanting to remove any bruises to the XBLA's reputation. Some developers may claim that the XBLA lineup is "total shit" - but that's one persons opinion. There are thousands of other people who did download those games. Sometimes those games aren't meant for players like you and me - we would mostly ignore the presence of Bliss Island, Word Puzzle or Arkadian Warriors - but they're not made for me! That's the beauty of the Xbox Live Arcade.
But some of these games get panned by reviewers. I'm not a fan of them, but again they're not made with me in mind - they're made for kids who can have a far better time with it than me, or a 'casual gamer' who enjoys the newspaper crosswords, or someone with a Dungeon Crawl itch that needs scratching. Games like Cyberball 2072 or Speedball 2 really only appeal to Europeans, or for those who were 'there' at them time.
Microsoft even have an incredibly strict release structure - each title must be approved by them before it can even start creating the game. So any game that ends up being bad or poorly thought out, like the Tron games, were all approved of by Microsoft in the first place. While good games have been denied the chance to be on the service.
The way developers have been living off the XBLA is the 'long tail' effect. The way XBLA games sell is that they have a sales surge in their first week of release, then a pretty quick drop off. Previously released data in this GameSetWatch article revealed that "the first two months of Xbox Live Arcade titles only account for around a third of its sales, with revenues continuing to come in at a steady pace over the following year.", and in this Gamasutra article from Gamefest shows off the long tail of downloadable games:
It's the whole point of digital distribution - a service which never needs to go down, allowing people to continue buying games even after their previous sales period. From my understanding the Arcade games for the original Xbox, which used an entirely different system set - are still available for download, as well as downloadable content for Project Gotham Racing 2 despite the two Xbox 360 sequels and they're not even free!In fact, most of those games under the 65% line are classic games - games like Asteroids or Scramble - I didn't buy them because they're not for me!
In fact, according to Metacritic - 63 seperate games are below the 65% line already - that's over half of the current XBLA lineup.
In this world of patches a opinions can also change - take Mr. Driller Online for instance. It's single player campaign is fine with some poor graphics on top - but the Multiplayer is completely broken. So IGN end up giving the game a 2.5, a very poor review due to the broken online. Namco have said they will be patching the game though, the game would have likely changed after this was fixed. Still, the 2.5 remains. The recent Penny Arcade game has been getting some fine reviews, but EDGE Magazine also gave it a 4 out of 10, lowering the overall mark by a large margin, and due to the high price might not sell as well as other, cheaper games. If the game gets consistent 7 and 8's like it is, that one score could throw them under that line.
Xbox Live Arcade games are not reviewed like every other game either! Arcade titles don't tend to get reviews at all, not nearly as many as regular titles. Take Word Puzzle for instance - it has a Metacritic rating of 44%, but that's out of 15 reviews total, hardly a large enough sum to warrant removal from the service. Gripshift - a game I found absolutely fantastic has a Metacritic score of 77% out of only 25 reviews. A true game like Project Gotham Racing 4 gets over 60 reviews.
The Metacritic audience is NOT the Xbox Live Arcade audience! I actually disagree with the way Arcade or downloadable titles are reviewed. For instance, Lost Winds just came out on WiiWare, and has gotten a lot of positive reviews - except a lot of them push on the fact that this title will only last 2 to 4 hours. I don't expect games to last longer than 3 or 4 hours when they're only $10US - I'm paying full price sometimes for titles which are much not much longer.
So what happens once the games I own get delisted? You are in fact able to download the games again, as written in this follow up, but using your download history is a huge pain and doesn't allow new users to buy! If you have a friend who just bought a Xbox 360 and you're recommending titles - they may not be able to buy it! This goes against the entire point of online distribution, where there IS no shelf space that needs emptying - it's all there and anyone at any point can buy it!
It's all very confusing and very unnecessary. Admittedly another company has done this before - Nintendo. Last year in Europe Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels for Wii Virtual Console - but only for a week. It was a limited time "get it while you can" release, but there was never any real reason for it - it's digital! It's disgusting.
Microsoft said that they would announce 3 months ahead of time whether or not a game will be removed - what's the point of this? You're going to remove it anyhow, the developer can't start advertising it on marketplace since you're removing it! All this ends up doing is scaring developers from doing something different and interesting, something that may not sell particularly well - the PS3 thrives on these bizarre games like flOw and the PixelJunk series which may not end up selling all that well - but they're not going to stop you trying. This will.
I believe this is a very dumb decision - and I hope that this uproar - much like the Mass Effect DRM uproar and the Battlefield Bad Company "buy extra guns" uproar - will cause Microsoft to rethink their strategy.
Right now the main problem with getting more people on the Xbox Live Arcade is the - frankly confusing Xbox 360 Operating System which now hides away the Xbox Live Arcade and lumps it with everything else. The only source of official XBLA news is through Major Nelson and a press release - there is no actual community newsletter or way to preview something on Xbox without having to go through hoops. America might be different since they have the Inside Xbox program, but Microsoft haven't been actively supporting a whole lot of Xbox Live Arcade. That's why I made this site in the first place!
So start yelling and carrying on, start digging, make your voice heard on what you think of this plan. You may have to grab your copy of Roboblitz right now.
On a lighter note: Microsoft have made a new development team to work on internal XBLA titles, and the filesize has been expanded from 150 to 350 megabytes.
There have been plenty of other great articles on this topic, here are some link to what I thought were the best - they're all must reads:
Gamasutra - Opinion: Why Artificial Scarcity Could Boost Digital Game Downloads
Angry-Gamer.net - Microsoft to XBLA Developers: "I Expect You To Die"
Mersey Remakes - More Clueless XBLA Decisions
Game|Life - Microsoft: Don't Cut Off the Long Tail
And of course, the original interview:
Source: Next-Gen.Biz: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MS to Delist XBLA Titles
11 comments:
You can redownload titles that aren't on marketplace. You just have to go into your account to redownload them and not the marketplace. I've done it for tv shows quite a few times.
Just to clear up a few things:
-Major Nelson is not on the community team.
-Gamerscoreblog is an official XBLA (and other Xbox) news source.
Interesting argument. I think a lot of this is due to the fact that with all the content comming out, MS is having a hell of a time trying to organize it all. You can see this by the fact that they've changed the marketplace blades with almost every firmware update they've done.
If the XBLA library baloons up to, say, 300 games it's going to be hard if you're a new user to search through all that and find something you like. I personally don't think deleting games is the right thing to do, but I can kind of see both sides of this.
Major Nelson may not be the official XBLA news source, but at least he can tell people whether or not a new video has been released or an expansion. GSB never mentioned Chessmaster Live having new Content: Breaking the Lines did it? How are they expected to sell that if nobody knows about it?
I am with an Indie dev/publisher and we have an XBLA game coming out VERY soon, so I am obviously biased but I actually applaud Microsoft's actions. The problem for small companies like us is rising above the noise, since the EA's and Vivendi's can throw millions at marketing. I think our upcoming title, Buku Sudoku, is great (of course I would) but we realize it's going to be very hard to get noticed. I don't think the criteria Microsoft has put in place is overly burdensome and by culling some of the deadwood people will be able to more easily find good games (and hopefully ours).
That said, several things I definitely agree with Ryan. First, the metascore criteria is definitely flawed. XBLA titles by their nature do not always review well (nor are they intended to). Also, you look at Amazon and they still do a good job of directing you to what you want while keeping the long tail intact. That said, I think Microsoft is really trying and the first solution will not be perfect.
Lloyd
bukusudoku360.com
It's really interesting to read a comment from an actual developer on this. I'd love to see more of those.
- Tony
I think you should spend your time worrying about something more important. Delisting sounds like a great idea to me.
Delisting games on the basis of 12 review scores is not a great idea...rather it's a bit ridiculous.
Hey Tony, if you want to see another developer's opinion, go to the gamerscore blog article about this. DenisDenis (Denis Bourdain, the creator of Mad Tracks) said what he thinks abou this:
"I was at the Wii days in LA a few weeks ago.
One of their simple idea is to give the players that bought the game, a chance to rate, categorize and rank it.
The players get to decide, just like on PC casuals.
In my opinion, it makes sense. I made Mad Tracks, over 70.000 people bought the game but we 'only' got 62% metacritic, partialy due to bad reviews from harcore web sites.
Please consider a more user compatible criteria :)
Cheers,
DenisDenis."
Here's something I put on the xbox.com fourums (*long rant*):
"I don't hate the idea, but I think it's dumb and pointless. Why delist games? They are still on the servers, so what is the point of removing them from the list? As someone commented on Major Nelson, It's like throwing away perfectly usable TVs.
Instead of delisting titles, try some alternatives. Give them discounts at 25% or 50% off, and if the game still has poor sales, make it 75% off and ASK the community if they want the game removed. That, or update the Marketplace so you don't have to delist games in the first place.
DON'T DELIST GAMES OVER WHAT THE CRITICS THINK; DELIST GAMES OVER WHAT THE COMMUNITY THINKS.
Think of the "long tail". Developers make a lot of money at first, and the sales go down later, HOWEVER the profits they made still add up over time. Developers don't want to have to spend around $300,000 on a game only to have it delisted. Not to mention developers will be too afraid to try anything new because they fear it will get delisted. Wasn't Microsoft boasting about how "XBLA developers won't have to fight for shelf space."?
One of the 3 steps to getting a game delisted means that every 6 out of 100 people who download the trial have to buy it. However, anyone who has Auto Downloads on automatically increases the chance of a game getting delisted.
Just because Metacritic gives a game below 65% doesn't automatically mean the game is bad. Look at the list of potentially delistable games and see if you find any good games. The games I think are good have a star next to them:
* Arkadian Warriors
Asteroids / Asteroids Deluxe
Battlestar Galactica
Centipede & Millipede
* Contra
* Crystal Quest
Cyberball 2072
Defender
Double Dragon
* Ecco the Dolphin
* Fatal Fury Special
Frogger
* Geon : Emotions
Gyruss
Hardwood Backgammon
Hardwood Hearts
Hardwood Spades
* Mad Tracks
* Marathon : Durandal
Missile Command
New Rally-X
Novadrome
Pac-Man
Root Beer Tapper
Rush'n Attack
Scramble
Screwjumper!
Shrek-N-Roll
Soltrio Solitaire
Speedball 2 : Brutal Deluxe
Spyglass Board Games
* Street Trace: NYC
Super Contra
Tempest
* Tetris Splash
* Texas Hold 'em
* Time Pilot
* TiQal
Track & Field
Wing Commander Arena
Word Puzzle
Xevious
Yie Ar Kung-Fu
You probably agreed or disagreed with my choices. However, that's the fun of XBLA. There is something for just about everyone. Microsoft is doing some spring cleaning, however they are also going to make harder for us to get games, and even harder for new customers."
I also agree, its a very bad idea to delist xbla titles. and i love arcade games. i have around 40 arcade titles on my xbox and play them quite alot. also i dont like the idea of the marketplace content for these games that i spent on getting delisted. i know about the download history stuff but what happens if it could affect my history of downloads. one of them already says.. "unknown game content" and i cant redownload it. bad move microsoft do not do it you will upset some of the customers out there. oh and one more thing. bring double dragon back, my little nephew wants that game coz he likes to get the achievments for it.
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