Jeff On Games

So, if you haven’t heard, Microsoft announced at GameFest that they’d be deploying a new community market place this fall on the Xbox 360, and that developers will be able to keep (up to) 70% of the revenue generated from games on the community marketplace. While not unexpected, this is pretty huge news.

Before getting on to commentary, I’d like to quickly point out how revolutionary this whole set up is. This is the first time in my knowledge that a major console company has actively encouraged (or even allowed) development on a retail console at any price (Sony had a version of the PSOne you could develop for, but it was not a retail kit). In addition, this is certainly the first time that any console manufacturer has encouraged a community in which to share those games (the Creators Club) and even more importantly, this is the first time a console manufacturer has created a marketplace where anyone can download created games and anyone can make money off of those games. Even with the fact that you are limited to a .NET sandbox, this is pretty huge, and I’m pretty excited about it.

That said, when Community Arcade was announced, and later when they announced Community Marketplace, I was nervous, though I couldn’t figure out why. It struck me when I was at a game store over the weekend. There are a lot of freaking games out there now. A ton. And, honestly, 90% of them aren’t any good. There are also a lot of XBLA games, and, honestly, about 90% of them aren’t any good. With Community Arcade/Community Marketplace, you can be sure 99% of games on there won’t be any good. It makes it really hard and frequently frustrating attempting to find those hidden gems that really make it all worth it. Certainly, community reviews, Metacritic, and similar sites help find games, but what do you do for those games that are fringe (and therefore generally ignored or given low Metacritic and community scores), but awesome? Certainly the viral aspects that Microsoft is putting in (send this to a friend and, hopefully, a rating system) will help, but even then many fringe games get overlooked because there’s just too much else coming out right at the same time. I just hope that the game industry isn’t a victim of its own success, having so much content that none of it makes any real money.

Regardless, I’m not sure it’s an actual issue. You can be sure I’m already working on XNA prototype games. I’m not going to miss this opportunity.