Xbox Live Arcade is full of s**t

[Zeus]

Developers have apparently revealed that Nintendo has been capitalizing on developers frustrations with Xbox Live Arcade to help drive the number of games produced for WiiWare. Nintendo have been promising developers better royalties, cheaper development and more flexible pricing. "Frankly, we're not looking at making games for Xbox Live Arcade because the service is full of ****," said one developer, who is not impressed with the service's number of retro remakes.


"Nintendo has made it very clear to us that we'll not only be making a better royalty rate from WiiWare games, but we'll also have a better chance of selling games - the service won't be clogged up with the retro titles that have blighted the chances of many independent studios on Xbox Live Arcade," said one studio business development boss, speaking to Develop under conditions of anonymity.


News Source: <a href="http://www.developmag.com/news/29474/Nintendos-secret-war-on-Xbox-Live-Arcade-and-PlayStation-Store" target=_blank">developmag</a>

[jiminton]

Key to its pitch is that WiiWare isn't populated by retro releases


What?? I haven't seen anything that is not retro.

[starwave]

wow,this person sounds pretty pissed.dont blame them tho,almost 80% of xbox live arcade games are retro games,not enough new IP live games from developers.MS is getting worse by the minute. dont let me get started on their customer support. COMPLETELY WORTHLESS!!!:mad:

[dalezer]

the RETRO acrcade ports are CRAP, boring and not worth a single MS point. If your smart and resourceful enough, you can get ALL of the same games and then some for FREE on ur PC.

[fanatic]

"Frankly, we're not looking at making games for Xbox Live Arcade because the service is full of ****," said one developer, who is not impressed with the service's number of retro remakes."

This person was obviously born in the past 12 years and isn't old enough to appreciate retro gaming

[Swytch]

What?? I haven't seen anything that is not retro.

WiiWare is not out yet, you are confusing this with Virtual Console Titles, which are all retro games, WiiWare will be only for New games (Mostly by third party devs I think).

The other major difference is that WiiWare games can take full use of the WiiMote, including motion control, whereas virtual console titles do not (can not?/will not?) use the WiiMote motion sensing or tracking.

[phallius]

Promised more royalties....Did you get that notarized or contracted? IF you didn't, then you'll find out as a developer that M$ lies to keep the money rolling in. They did this in Europe and got SUED to the total of 1.6 billion. Why did they get sued? They were charging about 3.5% royalty fees, then without a word or without a CONTRACT, they raised their royalty fees to 7%. Why? No reason, just because they are M$. They violated about every "good faith" law that Europe has concerning proprietary, licensed software. Why would ANYONE BUY ANYTHING FROM THEM. If you love M$, go play your 360 and use VISTA (makes sure you pray when you press the power button.) One more thing...MAC, Please make an OS for MS apps (not the sluggish, on top of Mac 10-crap.) Make an OS that is MAC OS free and runs on a PC. You could single handedly save the world, and make billions doing it!:D

[Kamalot]

XBL Arcade may be full of ****, but at least that **** has playable demos. Playable demos are great for CONSUMERS to make informed choices about the games they buy.

The overwhelming majority of games on PSN DO NOT HAVE DEMOS. None of WiiWare games will have demos.

Having a huge selection is a GOOD thing. Sure, there are LOTS of crappy TV programs, movies, books, etc. That indicates a healthy form of media. The PS2 had a HUGE ton of shitty games. The large library lets gems rise to the top.

I have a 360, a Wii and a PS3. Yes, there are some shity ports on XBLA. Try them out. If you find them to be awful, don't buy them. Consumers win. On the PS3, I don't even go into their store any more. The store is awful, the downloads are anemic, and there is rarely a demo for downloadable games. It fails completely when compared to Live Arcade. Likewise, I purchased some REALLY TERRIBLE games on Wii's Virtual Console. These days, I don't even bother any more unless I already know the game or can play it at a friend's first.

[danight]

I agree demos is very important. I see something and go "awww cool i want that" then try the demo (like tron) and go aww this sucks bad.

as far as clutter... most live users know where to go to look for new stuff. Anything new will be there and gets added to the list. If wii games didnt suck so bad people would be buying wii ware games. But with only first party games worth a crap and everything else seems like a gimmick or rushed game. It easy to see why people look at retro titles. But really who would buy a turbo graphics game on wii vs buying a actual arcade version on live or psn?

Only games ive bought on wii is those timeless classics like super mario world.

[jiminton]

WiiWare is not out yet, you are confusing this with Virtual Console Titles, which are all retro games, WiiWare will be only for New games (Mostly by third party devs I think).

The other major difference is that WiiWare games can take full use of the WiiMote, including motion control, whereas virtual console titles do not (can not?/will not?) use the WiiMote motion sensing or tracking.

Are you serious? So, Nintendo is saying their **** is better because they put them in a different menu/category? WTF! Please tell me that I am wrong, because if they think putting their retro games in a different place than their new games makes any difference they are nuts.

[chucky_uk]

Promised more royalties....Did you get that notarized or contracted? IF you didn't, then you'll find out as a developer that M$ lies to keep the money rolling in. They did this in Europe and got SUED to the total of 1.6 billion. Why did they get sued? They were charging about 3.5% royalty fees, then without a word or without a CONTRACT, they raised their royalty fees to 7%. Why? No reason, just because they are M$. They violated about every "good faith" law that Europe has concerning proprietary, licensed software. Why would ANYONE BUY ANYTHING FROM THEM. If you love M$, go play your 360 and use VISTA (makes sure you pray when you press the power button.) One more thing...MAC, Please make an OS for MS apps (not the sluggish, on top of Mac 10-crap.) Make an OS that is MAC OS free and runs on a PC. You could single handedly save the world, and make billions doing it!:D

You really dont know what your talking about do you.

I would suggest you read why they were penalised and then come back with the truth.

They didnt get sued, they got fined you moron.

[grapeape]

Promised more royalties....Did you get that notarized or contracted? IF you didn't, then you'll find out as a developer that M$ lies to keep the money rolling in. They did this in Europe and got SUED to the total of 1.6 billion. Why did they get sued? They were charging about 3.5% royalty fees, then without a word or without a CONTRACT, they raised their royalty fees to 7%. Why? No reason, just because they are M$. They violated about every "good faith" law that Europe has concerning proprietary, licensed software. Why would ANYONE BUY ANYTHING FROM THEM. If you love M$, go play your 360 and use VISTA (makes sure you pray when you press the power button.) One more thing...MAC, Please make an OS for MS apps (not the sluggish, on top of Mac 10-crap.) Make an OS that is MAC OS free and runs on a PC. You could single handedly save the world, and make billions doing it!:D

What in the heck do royalties paid to MS for licensing their tools have to do with Nintendo promising bigger royalties paid to developers for Wiiware? Did you actually read what the article was about?

[chucky_uk]

wow,this person sounds pretty pissed.dont blame them tho,almost 80% of xbox live arcade games are retro games,not enough new IP live games from developers.MS is getting worse by the minute. dont let me get started on their customer support. COMPLETELY WORTHLESS!!!:mad:

Obviously you are yet to deal with Sony support then, as they are just as bad. All big corporate companies have terrible customer support.

Why is it bad to have retro games?? Man there are a lot of mature gamers out there like myself. I like playing retro game's just because you dont, doesnt meant the rest of dont like playing them.

[gonepostl]

Money Money Money blah blah blah
Microsoft is the only company doing this right, PERIOD!

[yourM0M1]

i wonder which service has better sales though?? your smaller royalties are becuase nin and the devs dont make **** since they arent as popular....we will see what wiiware does for their service though

[Kamalot]

Obviously you are yet to deal with Sony support then, as they are just as bad. All big corporate companies have terrible customer support.

I've had EXCELLENT customer service from Nintendo. They replaced my DS for a single dead pixel. They replaced my brother's Wii after his kid shoved 2 discs in there.

I've had MODERATE customer service success with Microsoft. They were prompt and courteous, but made me jump through a bunch of testing hoops first, while Nintendo's response was more along the lines of, "Sorry about that. Lets replace it."

I've had TERRIBLE customer service from Sony. They went so far as to asking me if I'd ever used a 3rd party controller or memory card in my PS2. I had. My fault for admitting so. They denied any problem with the console, blaming my use of 3rd party peripherals on my PS2 dying.

[sigma8]

Are you serious? So, Nintendo is saying their **** is better because they put them in a different menu/category? WTF! Please tell me that I am wrong, because if they think putting their retro games in a different place than their new games makes any difference they are nuts.

You're wrong.

It makes a huge difference. I used to use Gamespot to help me make a lot of my game-purchase decisions. I preferred them over sites like gamerankings or metacritic, because those review-aggregate sites really are only helpful if the majority of the reviews are good, or if they are mostly bad. If a game gets less than 50% on gamerankings, you KNOW it's crap. If it's higher than 90%, you are almost positive it will be good.

Anything in between is something of a crapshoot. Maybe everyone gave it 75%, or maybe the world is divided, and some people loved it and some people hated it. With a bunch of 100% and 50% scores. It just doesn't tell the whole story. So that's why I prefer to find a site I trust, and then go by their advice. Anyway, that's my backstory...

So, when I am looking for Wii games, I click on "Wii" and then "browse all reviews". When I do that, Gamespot lists all their "Wii (Virtual Console)" and "Wii" all mixed in together. Given the sheer volume of virtual console releases compared to modern Wii releases. This made it a lot harder to come up with a nice list of highly rated, modern Wii games. I think I posted that suggestion once to their site enhancement forum--to separate out Virtual Console games from "real" games. Because you try to "browse all games"...and you KNOW the Wii doesn't have 300 games out...it sure doesn't feel that way when you go shopping. But hey, according to Gamespot it has that and more. Thanks to VC mix-ins.

Imagine if you went to a grocery store, and they just had all the groceries mixed together in a couple giant boxes. You just had to pick through everything until you found what you wanted. Imagine a library with no organization.

Netflix is paying out a prize of 1 million dollars to anyone who can come up with an algorithm for their "If you liked ____ we also recommend ____" stuff that's a mere 10% better than the one they have now (which is already pretty good). They think it's worth it, because it will allow people to find things they want to watch more easily.

Let's say you want to buy some blu-ray writeable discs.. Now look at these two sites:
http://www.buy.com/cat/dvd-storage-media/15837.html
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=71&name=CD-DVD-Media

In the buy.com site, they don't have high definition writeable media separated out. You can actually find it in the 1000 results if you go through the dozens of pages looking for them.

On newegg.com it's separated out, and you can easily find all their blu-ray media. It's true that on buy.com, you can do a search..but this implies you already know exactly what you need. What would you search for on XBLA? "indie game" "fun"? It's a little harder with games. And even then, back to our blu-ray example, buy.com doesn't do as good of a job. If you search for "blu-ray media" you'll give blu-ray hardware and laptops mixed in with your results.

There's a lot to be said for making products accessible. It really does have a huge impact on sales.

Let's say you're a huge Jeff Minter fan. Space Giraffe comes out. You know it's out. You don't care if you have to do an alphabetic search in XBLA to find it. You know what it's called, and you really want it. Even if you had to manually browse...heck, you know what you need. Go to the S's and then go a couple pages to "Space Giraffe". Buy. Done.

Now let's say you just bought an Xbox360 and you don't know WTF Jeff Minter is. You heard there are some innovative "indie" games being sold in XBLA marketplace. You're interested, but you don't know what you want, you would like to browse. You go to the XBLA marketplace, and you start browsing the selection to discover that you have to wade through a store where 90% of what is offered is retro crap that you're uninterested in.

It frustrates your browsing experience. You give up and just place some Halo3 online.

[shadyx]

Now let's say you just bought an Xbox360 and you don't know WTF Jeff Minter is. You heard there are some innovative "indie" games being sold in XBLA marketplace. You're interested, but you don't know what you want, you would like to browse. You go to the XBLA marketplace, and you start browsing the selection to discover that you have to wade through a store where 90% of what is offered is retro crap that you're uninterested in.

It frustrates your browsing experience. You give up and just place some Halo3 online.

if you've just bought a 360 i would presume you would look through the list thats available already so far and start picking randomly regardless of whether its sorted or not.

and in case you havent noticed, you can actually sort the games by type on the marketplace now as well...this is something that was added....oh...in the last dashboard update......like 4-5 months ago :P

[DanASBO]

Good sh*t. :D

Worms, Bomberman and Carcassone have to be my most played 360 games.

Keep the re-makes and originals coming MS. Lay off the retro releases though, I have a HDD full of emulators for that, and the 360 pad already works great with all of 'em.