Comments on: XBox Live Arcade: Digital Distribution, but without the Benefits

By: bob

bob — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:24:10 +0000

I don’t own an xbox and have never used live, but am curious about the reasoning behind this.

Is this a way to filter content? The article also suggests server issues, perhaps from hosting too much stuff?

My understanding from this post is that games appear in a giant list of some sort?

For filtering, normally similar services (amazon, youtube etc), use four main methods to filter content:

1. search
2. related lists
3. featured content
4. external links

Are these not available to live users? I suppose I can see them not having 1 for lack of keyboard, 2 for lack of content, and 4 for lack of web integration. If 3 is not available that would be surprising… but usually 3 is the least useful anyways.

youtube for example would be completely irrelevant if it didn’t have 1, 2 or 4. 1 and 4 are pretty much the only reason the web works at all.

I guess I’m just kind of shocked that they would just only use a giant list, if that really is all that they’re using.

By: sean

sean — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:44:34 +0000

The opposing point of view – namely, that artificial scarcity a: increases profitability; b: helps users find the good games and skip the chaff – can be found articulated here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18692

note that the Xbox Live announcement post-dates that opinion piece.

By: Dominic

Dominic — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:40:17 +0000

Very strange indeed. It would even come before Aarseth, which is somewhat of a feat in itself.

It seems to me like Microsoft is trying to avoid what happened to Atari (and to a greater extent the whole industry in 1983). It looks like they’re trying to push away the weak titles to make sure consumers do not become wary or dismissive of the whole XBLA thing because of a number of rotten apples. Which is a half-baked way of going about “quality assurance” without setting up teams to evaluate the products, thereby reducing costs. As you said, I’m not sure where’s the advantage now.