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Long Live Xbox Live Arcade
Edge Online has a piece up talking about the success of Xbox Live Arcade. They wonder out loud if the Live Arcade won't end up being the most important next-gen platform in this round of the console wars. From the article: "Live Arcade's conversion rate - the proportion of people who upgrade the demo to the full, paid-for version - is extraordinarily high, according to Canessa: 'The industry average on PC is about 0.8 per cent to one per cent, and in the first generation of Arcade we were hitting about 8.5 per cent, which was fantastic. But in this generation of Arcade we're hitting up to 35 per cent, and averaging over 20 per cent across all the titles. I mean, we had to check the data to make sure it wasn't a mistake. It's absolutely unheard of.'"
There's really no wonder why this tactic works. The user ir provided with the ability to actually get hands-on experience with the product (one of the games from Arcade) and is able to play a decent amount of it. After this experience, much like iTunes, the user is able to simply hit a few buttons, enter a few bits of data (if that) and have the full version of the game they just became addicted to within minutes! This is a much better system since the user has to do nearly nothing except enjoy playing a game in order to be sold on the product. It is truely a new era: They already purchased something they wanted (an Xbox 360), now they are doing something they wanted to do (playing a game), and are able to obtain that same game without leaving their home!
Slant
Between the Spaces
I think this is great! But at the same time, I think seeing the situation one year from now will really tell the tale. Anyone who gets a new system is going to likely get the "whole experience" right away. And then, after paying for the year of service, if they stick around... that will be the true measure of how well people accept/like/obsess about the Live service.
But it's still a great achievement.
I think this really describes it, I wonder how many of that 8% conversion is just people who bought geometry wars. A friend of mine got a 360 and a few games and they were OK, but we got bored of them pretty quick (DOA and Burnout) since it was mostly more of the same we had already been playing (DOA ultimate and .... well Burnout). I heard about the geometry wars thing here and told my friend about it so we tried it out. It was pretty sweet and very addicting, and since it was only like $5 he purchased it right on the spot.
At this point I thought maybe the arcade thing would be pretty sweet so we looked through some more of the titles... and the rest are pretty bad. I mean there are even card games. And total there are maybe 25-30 games right now? I don't know for sure because I didn't count but it's not a lot when you realize they have like 6 categories of games so when you go in to a particular category (like board games, action games, etc) there are only 4-5 games in there. So far he hasn't purchased any other games from the arcade because there aren't really any worth purchasing.
I know there are getting new games going in soon, like Street Fighter II which will be pretty cool, but I still find it a bit humorous that the best game on the 360 right now is a vector based asteroids clone basically that costs $5. On a machine that cost around $500 for the system, controllers, and hard drive :p
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Actually, it is a little bit worse than that.
If Microsoft had made the hard-drive STANDARD we could have downloaded bigger games.
For a game to be put on Xbox Live Arcade, it MUST fit on a memory card.
But then again, I don't think any of the games are even close to filling that.
No reason to lie.