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.

XBLA Delisting - Developer Response Part 2 - Merscom LLC

For Part 1 of Delisting - Developer Response, click here.

For the second part of responses, I was able to talk with Lloyd Melnick, Chief Customer Officer and Co-Founder of Merscom, who recently released Buku Sudoku onto the service. With their single release on the Xbox Live Arcade now under their belt, Mr. Melnick has a much different take on the changes to that of Metanet.

Lloyd Melnick, CCO and Co-founder of Merscom

"I support this policy. I think it is important to maintain a consistent level of quality and if a game is not hitting these targets (which are not that rigorous) they aren't giving the gamer a good experience.

"We put almost three years into Buku and it is frustrating that there is so much noise that player's may not realize our game really is good.

"I always believe in quality over quantity and I think the Microsoft policy is a good move in this direction. I understand how some developers feel they might end up wasting their effort, but I think if they make a REAL effort these hurdles should be a piece of cake."

Tune in Friday for more thoughts from Xbox Live Arcade developers, and how we can help the XBLA to reach its full potential.

Thanks to Lloyd Melnick for taking the time to respond to my query.

XBLA Delisting - More articles about the new policies.

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.”

“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. ”

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.

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.

Rant Mode: Microsoft to start delisting Xbox Live Arcade Titles

[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