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The Xbox Live Arcade - One Year Later
Via Joystiq, an article at GamePro asking is Live Arcade worth it? One year after its launch, the service has been transformed by lots of retro classics, some brand new games, and the addition of the (now working) movie and television download service. What parts are good, what parts are bad, and ultimately, is it worth it? From the article: "Many of XBLA's original games draw their inspirations from classic video games, and the poster child for XBLA originals is Bizarre Creations' Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Released with the launch of Xbox 360, Geometry Wars showed a skeptical world just how cool original yet classically styled downloadable games could be. It plays like a crazed combination of all-time classics Asteroids and Robotron: 2084, with your lone, triangular spaceship pitted against literally endless hordes of nasty geometric shapes. The level of onscreen carnage is legendary; never has a game had more spectacular or over-the-top particle effects, showing that even simple games can be flashy."
... is what comes out when you put Space Duel, Tempest and Robotron 2084 in a blender and press the 'Puree' button. And there's still a (discontinued,banninated) Win32 version floating out there on the InterTubes
First off let me start by explaining who owns the Xbox Live Marketplace. Microsoft. Period. This is like someone drawing a comic (the developer) and I own a shop. If I think you're charging too much, not giving enough, or not being nice, you're not in my shop. PERIOD. So all the fault with the problems come back to Microsoft in that Microsoft allowed them to happen.
Now let's get into the Xbox Live Arcade. There's a large amount of good games on it. Let's start with Geometry wars, Marble blast, and Mutant storm. These are three excellent games that came out almost at launch. Each of them are great in different ways.
But not all games were great at launch, the biggest problem child is Bankshot Billards 2, which they gave away for free with the 12 month live boxes. That's a 15 dollar value! Except it's not. Backshot billards 2 is a below average game for anyone who doesn't REALLLLY like pool. And this brings us to the big problem, the value of the games are skewed.
Can someone tell me why I'm paying 5 dollars for Contra, or Defender? I can shell that out for sinstar easily, but when you don't even know if the co-op online is going to work. Why am I paying 15 dollars for Small Arms (though fun, isn't worth that much single player)? There's a great many games that are overpriced, and the biggest problem is that those prices will NOT go down, why should they? Microsoft has a monopoly on the market.
In addition Microsoft has allowed really shady customers (sharks) into the kiddie pool. Lumines Live for instance is stated as being a full game. However when you pay 15 dollars for it you find out "It's not a full game". You miss out on mission/Puzzle/ Vs. Cpu, and other modes. So really all you get is base mode and skin mode. Nice. Then you shell out even more for Advanced mode (Btw if you paid for Lumines, that's actually worth it). A better system would have been to give away the entire engine for free, but only allow full play if you buy the base pack or advance pack or another pack (which hasn't even been released yet). Microsoft should have just said no to that idea. All told a consumer will have to pay almost 40 bucks for what they can get on the PS2 for 20 or the PSP for 20? Not a good move.
And to make matters more complicated, Microsoft has screwed the developer by placing rules in place to make sure your Arcade game is no bigger then 50 megs. Which results in Developers screwing consumers by charging more for the second download so they can get around that rule (See Lumines again). Many good games won't be able to exist on the Arcade, but easily will exist on PS3's marketplace style stuff. How they will do Symphony of the Night on the Arcade will be interesting.
This isn't to say Microsoft doesn't have good choices. The limit in price for a Xbox Live game is 1200 points I believe (might be 1600 but I don't think so). They only give out a certain amount of tickets so no matter how much people want to flood the arcade with retro crap they can't just do it. But still Microsoft has a huge boone and they need to focus their energies on new games.
That being said there has been a turn around recently from a week marketplace to a good one. Small Arms while over priced is interesting, Assault heroes this week is a great buy, and Roboblitz is a really interesting game. However right around any corner is a pile of Retro games waiting to junk up the month.
The biggest boone out of all the rubble is demos. Wii needs to get something like that. Ps3 should already have it. The marketplace demos are good, but the Arcade demos sell more games then anything. And that's the core of the solution. Try before you buy and enjoy what's worth money. Geometry wars and mutant storm, yes. Retro games, probably not.
There's a lot of other Microsoft flaws with marketplace operations (microsoft points, themes and pictures for sale even though you buy the game, overcharging for themes and pictures) but that's the core of the marketplace, not the arcade itself.
Does anyone know how many copies of this game have been sold? I mean the business model behind this game should be a motivation for any indie game developer out there! e.g. 1 million copies times $4 dollars (assuming microsoft gets $1 on a $5 sale) is 4 million dollars thats not bad for a couple of month work I guess.
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
Nintendo, as I understand, basically has emulators in the Wii. All they need to dump is the game image, the control manual, and fix some control mapping schemes. It's not like you can use the motion sensing of the Wiimote in Ecco the Dolphin.
Nintendo, at least from what I've heard announced, has 0 truly new games coming to the VC. Microsoft has had Geometry Wars, RoboBlitz, Small Arms, Assault Heroes, Cloning Clyde, Outpost Kaloki, and Wik: Fable of Souls (some of these are also PC games, some are purely on the Xbox 360). And there's more on the way.
Does this mean Microsoft gets a free pass? No. At E3 there were a ton of titles that they said were going to hit XBLA before year's end. They're not here yet. And some games aren't worth even $5.00 (or "400 points").
I'm glad XBLA exists. A lot of those games are more fun than their $50 or $60 counterparts.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.