An Xbox Live-like Service For Open/Indie Gaming?

Posted by simoniker on Monday February 16, 2004 @11:21AM from the with-added-fourteen-year-olds-swearing-at-you dept.

Byrne Reese writes "Amidst all the crazy ideas in online video entertainment in the past year, there is a small company called Arena Unlimited that is taking an interesting approach to gaming economies. As near as I can tell, they're trying to open up a multitude of online gameplay services (e.g., opponent matching, free market item trading) to the masses (i.e., open source and independent PC game developers). (I shudder to think what would happen if one could actually introduce a legitimate and real free market economy into The Sims.) It's no Xbox Live, and their list of supported games is pretty small, but if they can do all that they say they may one day support, then sign me up."

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XLive? It's a *TON* of work by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-16 14:55 · Score: 0, Troll

I'm a programmer, and have worked on one of the XBox Live games available now. All these things people rant about-- consistent UI, etc, are a *TON* of work to implement, and implement absofraggingly perfectly (or MS will fail you). All these features sound nice, but they don't come cheap or easy-- they take time away from working on, say, the game.

All this work is forced onto developers because MS can say "or we won't allow your game to be published." That's one heck of a stick, and it works. How are you going to enforce such a thing for open source? Even if you do one better than MS and actually have source code that drops in quickly (don't get me started on how XLive isn't), creating UIs, etc will take up a long time.