Ghost Razor

In my self-imposed hermitdom, I’ve been playing a lot of Browser Games as a change of pace and essentially as a time-eater.  In particular the titles I’ve paid most attention to are Ikariam, Travian, and more recently Wild Guns.  Ikariam and Travian are conceptually what you would get if you made a casual version of Civilization, built it as a browser game, and made it a lot shittier.  Wild Guns is made by the same company as Ikariam, and it looks like they saw Travian, stole the gameplay and business models, and put a wild west theme on it.

A number of years ago I spent a lot of time playing browser games like Archmage, and while the production quality seems to have increased somewhat, the game play is not significantly better.

Gameplay works like this:  Resources exist, and they are given to you as a function of infrastructure you have built over long swaths of time (like, hours).  The purpose of this is to make you log on every day or several times a day, over weeks and weeks to maintain your kingdom.  You use these resources to build further infrastructure, which in turn either generates more resources, or allows you to build a stronger military.  You are then encouraged to attack other players using this military.

For me, this is where the game starts to fall apart.  As there is essentially an indomitable amount of players in the game, you can’t hope to destroy them all.  The only reward for attacking others is further resources, but the amount of resources you raid are almost certainly less than the resources it took to create the military you lost during the raid.  There is no endgame, only an endless series of skirmishes, which are in themselves, unsatisfying.

Archmage happens to be an exception, in that if you manage to survive long enough, and become powerful enough, you can cast a spell which destroys the world, thus ending the game until the server is reset.  You gain a certain amount of recognition for doing this.  Nevertheless, any task that requires occasional maintenance has potential for addiction (see Tamagotchi), and I remain a willing slave, to a certain extent, until I finish the tech tree and will the inevitably get bored.

What irritates me more than the lack of solid javascript-based strategy games (Facebook is full of inane stunts in this manner) is the business model these games operate under.  The business model itself serves no purpose other than to undermine the very foundations of the game they’ve delivered, however sloppily.

Ikariam, Travian, and Wild Guns all use the same principles:  The game is free to play, nothing is restricted, and no ads are served.  However, there are premium services you can buy for a micro-payment.  The first form of these is an increase in the rate at which you generate resources.  Essentially you can pay the company to gain a direct competitive edge.  The reason this is horrendous is because it complete destroys game balance by giving players that are willing to pay a substantial advantage over those who are not willing to pay.  You then have the choice to shell out a few dollars for more resources per hour (but only for a week, after which point you need to pay again!), or you can get slaughtered by those who will.  From a design standpoint, this is exceptionally poor.

Even worse than this however, is the “Premium Account” bonus.  If you give these companies an amount of money which is roughly equivelant to bumping up the production of every resource in the game, they give you access to a better user interface.  They have developed a user interface which is better than the default one:  it provides you with a build queue so that you don’t need to log in every time something finishes building to start the next build, gives you more detailed information about combat, a better layout with details about when your stockpiles will be full, what time you’ll be able to build something at current rates of production, etc.  The company has built these things, but they withhold them from you unless you pay them.  Even if you pay them, you only get them for a week, and then you have to pay them again.  Jon Crowley was appalled, so you know it’s a bad move.

Three Rings has a much better handle on it (although I suppose their games aren’t strictly in-browser).  In Puzzle Pirates, for example, payment confers the ability to captain a ship, as well as earn vanity items (e.g. clothing, furniture, etc.).  This allows the hardcore to be hardcore without upsetting the balance for the non-paying crowd.  In any case, any casual browser game needs to support itself on a small percentage of their entire user base actually paying money to play.  GameForge AG nearly went bankrupt last year, Puzzle Pirates has 3 million pirate accounts.  You tell me which business model is working better.

Tags: Design, Indie, Online by Morphix
2 Comments »

A friend of mine recently introduced me to a game called Dwarf Fortress.  The pitch went something like this:

“Have you ever heard of Dungeon Keeper?”

“Have you ever heard of Fuck Yeah I’ve heard of Dungeon Keeper?”

“Well this is like Dungeon Keeper, except way more sophisticated and in three dimensions”.

At this point I started gibbering maniacally as I attempted to assimilate the awesomeness of the concept leveled at my encephalon.

“Well there’s just one thing, it’s a roguelike, all the graphics are in ASCII”.

What an emotional roller coaster.  I thought it was too good to be true.  If Dungeon Keeper 3 ever emerged from the ashes of a studio murdered by EA, I would be waiting in line outside Future Shop with tears of joy in my eyes.  The concept of hacking away at an ASCII game though did not really appeal to me.  Nevertheless, I gave it a try.

That was a week ago, and I haven’t eaten or slept since.  I sit here, moribund and wretched, hoping that this game will release me from its cruel, cruel embrace.  The developers who wrote this game are clearly doing it for their own amusement, and find the development of gameplay to be infinitely more interesting than making it pretty or intuitive.

Despite the face that the game uses only ASCII graphics, it requires a modern processor.  The reason for this is because all the cycles usually spent figuring out where polygons should go and how exactly to display them, in real-time, have been freed up to do insane gameplay things.  For example:

• The first time you play, you need to procedurally generate a world in which you will put your fortress.  This world will be big.  Fractal algorithms will be used to generate terrain.  Erosion will be applied.  Rock formations are geologically accurate, as is the hydrology.  An entire history will be generated for this world, for you to explore should you so desire to do so in Adventurer mode.
• Water behaves as water should, including transmitting pressure.  I have learned this the hard way after trying to dig reservoirs for myself and watching my fortress flood from below as the water rushes up.
• Dwarves have minds of their own.  On one occasion, one of my dwarves saw fit to kill another dwarf, drag his body into a workshop, tear his skull off, and make it into a totem.  He was laughing insanely the entire time.  I found this to be both highly amusing and somewhat disturbing (but mostly hilarious).
• Mechanical power exists, and you’ll have to build series of gears and axles if you want to harness it.  Due to what I assume is a bug in the game, it’s currently possible to make a waterwheel which powers a pump…which drives the waterwheel.  This setup will in fact also generate additional power that you can use to do useful work.  Apparently the developers don’t give a shit about the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
• Extremely sophisticated build pipelines exist, there seems to be 40-50 different types of work that dwarves can do, and it’s reasonably amusing to find a way to get that working properly.
• Losing is fun… and lose you will.  The learning curve of this game is like scaling a sheer cliff made of jagged glass - and your eyes only see the world in ASCII.  There’s something deeply amusing about piping a magma vent into the lair of some rowdy minotaurs who happened to be sharing the land with you, only to discover you’ve breached your fortress into theirs at a different level, and all your dwarves are dying in a firey blaze as well.

This is not a game for the meek, but if you can get over the initial struggle, you may also find yourself near death in front of your computer, contemplating how many times the sun has gone up and down since you last went outside.

Tags: Indie, Releases by Morphix
1 Comment »

To say that there’s a debate on whether or not video games are art is rather disingenuous. There are those who feel that video games are not, but I think it’s been demonstrated that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The very question of “Are video games art” doesn’t make sense. One doesn’t ask if drawings or film are art, these things are a medium through which art can be expressed. Anything can be a medium through which art is expressed, but that doesn’t mean that everything created using that medium is art. I doubt that Mr. Ebert would deny film being a viable medium for art, but he’s not exactly advocating the artistic merits of American Pie either.

And so we could discuss what the qualifications are for artwork, but I could make an entire blog devoted to that. The reality of the situation is that those types of decisions are made by consensus of the art critic community. We currently have a lot of game reviewers, who are paid money to play games and essentially tell the world if those games are worth paying for. This is only a valuable service only insofar as you can trust the integrity and opinions of those reviewers. Likewise, this service could be performed by a community, but is only useful insofar as you can trust the opinions of that community (and if the community is primarily composed of the idiots you find on XBL making various homophobic references, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in that). This is, however, not the same thing as evaluating the esprit of the game, as a work. And this is an area where things get a little fuzzy.

I’ve written before about the separation between an action which is highly addictive, and an action which is personally satisfying. These things are metabolically separate functions within humans. Unfortunately, they are often confused, and this is evidenced by a lack of clear distinction in this concept within the language (i.e. A game is simply “fun”). Case in point: N’Gai Croal chooses desktop tower defense in Slate’s Gaming Club game of the year.

Is obsession a valid selection criterion? I’d say so. It’s certainly one that I apply to other art forms. Whether I’m thinking about my favorite song, album, movie, TV show, novel, or play, I generally pick the one that I’ve responded to the strongest, the one that I can’t stop thinking about.

- N’Gai Croal

We don’t have accepted vocabulary that marks the difference between an experience that stays with you after you leave it because of the profound implications it has (For a film example, Memento) or because the experience was psychologically addictive (Spiderman 2). My point is, you can do both (The Matrix, the first one anyway).

Popularly, Jonathan Blow has seized upon this idea and seems to have emerged as the apologist for the concept. Unfortunately, I don’t feel many people seem to understand what he’s saying. In the same Slate Gaming Club article, Seth Schiesel talks about how Blow hates on Bioshock because it pretends to be an emergent Sandbox, when really it’s a constructed reality. I don’t really think that’s the point. While Blow does seem to prefer the Will Wright-esque emergent concepts that arise from atomic game rules, that’s only because of the satisfying experience it can provide. What he is essentially saying is that most games feed upon artificial scheduled rewards - the drug pathways, in my lingo - while very few provide a meaningful take-away.

What Blow is really asking is this: If we are going to make meaningful art, what is the mechanism that video games afford art that are not done through film, painting, poetry, or music? In his mind that mechanism is the structure of gameplay; the rules of the created world, and the exploration of those rules, should be the source of a certain profound satisfaction. I would call this a ludological art fundamentalist viewpoint. Certainly I can’t think of better contender for what the core of that experience would be, but I would take a more moderate viewpoint. Much as film is a unique medium from stage theatre, to say that the essence of the art in film is only in the cinematographer is disingenuous as well. Much of what makes a truly great film overlaps what makes a great play. So it is with video games.

Blow criticizes Bioshock for creating a non-authentic satisfaction. He argues that Bioshock’s marketing makes the claim that the game is about morality and choice, but this is not evidenced in the gameplay constructs (because your choice is irrelevant). I would say that Bioshock’s marketing as a game about choice is really quite brilliant. The game is not about choice, but rather the illusion of choice (Would you kindly agree with me). The fact that rescuing or saving the little sisters makes little difference in the stable state reinforces this concept, and it does it through gameplay.

Beyond that, I think the game is also a very powerful exploration of Objectivism, and one gets to literally explore the implications of that philosophy. Instead of through narrative and watching it occur, as one experiences in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Bioshock literally allows you to explore the aftermath of an environment which had adopted that philosophy, through the use of audio diaries and your experiences with the characters in the game. Those are not strictly ludological concepts, but are borrowed from film, which is perhaps why Blow doesn’t account for them. That Bioshock is able to do this, and at the same time make it relatively straightforward to bypass if you’re interested solely in entertainment shows that this game is a shining star of entertainment and art fused together. No, it’s not perfect, but art rarely is.

I don’t think that many people have explored the dynamic of using the gameplay, devoid of artificial rewards, as this satisfying experience, and that may be why it’s difficult to discuss it. I also think that adopting only the use of gameplay would make a game far more sterile than it could otherwise be. There are parallels between film and video games, and while it is ultimately to our detriment to make games that are trying to be films, ignoring the lessons learned in that medium serves no purpose either.

That said, I think Blow has gone somewhat overboard (which would make sense, considering this fundamentalist position). People who are interested in meaningful, authentically satisfying material will seek it out, and if it’s not available in the medium of video games, it is available in other fashions. Most people are not interested in being enlightened, and seek only entertainment. Having the entire industry produce nothing but games designed to be fine art will only result in the abandonment of the medium, for that exact reason. How many of the novels sold every year are truly profound? How many pieces of cinema leave concepts that dance in your mind as you drift off to sleep?

Daniel Radosh may be hungry for real food, but the rest of the world is clamoring for whatever cheap drugs they can find. This is not new, nor is it a sign of the times. This behavior is endemic of our species, and frankly I suspect it is a requirement for a stable society that most people not be interested in that which is profound. Ultimately most people will continue to make that which is entertaining, and occasionally a visionary will create a profoundly meaningful game. Those games will appeal to a much smaller set of people, and typically have much smaller budgets (would Citizen Kane have been even better if it had a $200 million dollar budget?). That doesn’t mean that AAA titles should not continue to push the boundaries of what is possible to make in video games, to explore the possibility space of what can be done with games, but I don’t think we need to get really whipped up about whether or not our games are art.

Tags: Indie, Industry by Morphix
1 Comment »

Much of the available tools recently provide more assistance to artists who need help programming (e.g. Torque Game Builder, Adventure Game Studio) than to programmers who need help getting artwork.  Daniel Cook has a great article on his blog to help you out if you fall into the latter category.

Tags: Artwork, Indie by Morphix
No Comments »

Yahtzee has a new Trilby game out, this time a stealth game, in distinct deviation from previous titles.  If you’ve been under a rock, the Chzo Mythos series of games are some of the best games available using the Adventure Game Studio toolkit and predominately feature a gentlemanly catburgler named Trilby.  Go check it out.

Tags: Indie, Platform, Releases by Morphix
No Comments »

Nintendo on Wednesday announced that they have joined Microsoft in offering a solution for independent developers to create content for their system. Full details have yet to emerge, but it would seem that WiiWare is designed to allow developers to produce games which can then be sold through the WiiShop Channel, Similar to the mechanism Microsoft is using to deploy XNA games through XBLA.

Level Up has an exclusive interview with NOA President Reggie Fils-Aime, where some interesting details were disclosed. Firstly, the pricing for a given game is determined exclusively by Nintendo. I’m not sure how this compares to the Microsoft method, as the entire “Getting my game on XBLA” process is somewhat opaque at this point (and I might add, Microsoft would do well to make it more transparent).

Secondly, WiiWare seems to not encompass libraries or tools that make to development process easier (a la XNA), but rather the simplification of the delivery channel. The argument for this is that development kits for the Wii are extremely inexpensive. While this is a valid point (They cost between $2,500 to $10,000), it’s certainly not on par with the concept behind XNA. Additionally, actually becoming an authorized developer so that you can get your hands on the kits is more complex, and as a result it is unlikely to target the homebrew community emerging around the Xbox 360. That would also not appear to be the intent, rather it would seem Nintendo is trying to simplify the process for small (but professional) development shops.

Thirdly the developer must seek its own ESRB Rating. As I don’t have a development company, I don’t even have access to the information regarding getting a game rated. There seems to be similar restrictions to getting a game rated that exist to get your hands on Wii DevKits. I would not be suprised if there was also a fee associated with getting a rating, but again this seems to tune WiiWare towards small independent developers rather than just anyone.

Reggie also states in the interview that Nintendo will not be overseeing the games, suggesting that any game that gets through this process and passes some basic requirements from Nintendo will be made available for purchase on the WiiChannel. Note that this is strictly different than the attitude Microsoft has developed. XBox Live Arcade is a carefully crafted entity into which new games are eligible only with the good graces of the managers who maintain the portfolio. In other words, XBLA will never be filled with 800 solitaire games, because Microsoft gets the final say on whether they’ll sell your game or not. The fact that Nintendo is not doing this is both good and bad. On one hand, it could conceivably encourage games that might not make it to XBLA, however possibilities exist for the marketing of a lot of crap that nobody is interested in buying.

All in all, I’m excited to see Nintendo is getting in on the independent developer market, and digital delivery, but WiiWare isn’t strictly comparable to XBLA, the two seem to be marketed at different audiences.  While many are quick to herald WiiWare as “Nintendo’s XBLA”, WiiWare does not in any way make it easy for “Anyone to create a Wii Game”.  WiiWare simplifies delivery mechanisms, not development mechanisms, so all those hopeful hobbyists will still have to remain weeping in the corner.

Now we just need to see when Sony is going to get on board.

Tags: Indie, Online, Platform by Morphix
No Comments »

I always thought it would be a neat idea to create additional content for a game by way of Alternate Reality Game type materials, and use it as a profit center. For example, frequently AAA games will release Art Books as a premium buy for people who are really hardcore about a product (Blizzard does this frequently). I think it would be significantly more interesting if such books were sold over Amazon.com or eBay under the pretense of being integrated into the storyline. Clearly this isn’t possible in all games, but in a significant number it would be.

Imagine, for example, one made a game based on the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft. If the designers of the game were to include part of their story bible, as well as some art work or concept sketches into a book, and call it the Necronomicon, sell it on eBay under some pretense of finding the thing somewhere, and leak the existence of such a book to the gaming press.

Well that’d be kinda cool.

This stealth-marketing ploy could even be possible pre-release to drum up a few bucks. The caveat there would be that the publishing channels one would have to go through would be less conventional, such as Lulu.com. Even so, this isn’t necessarly a bad thing, and in fact opens this up as a possible revenue channel for Indie game designers as well.

And here at GhostRazor, we’re all about the little guy.

Tags: Game Ideas, Indie, Marketing by Morphix
6 Comments »

I’ve recently finished reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and it got me thinking about a new approach to game assets. Game assets are the “things” that go into a game. For example, artwork (textures, 3D Models, Sprites), Sound Effects, Music, Voice, etc.

The primary job of the Artists, Sound Engineers, and Designers is to create this content. As gamers continue to demand higher quality games, one of the most straightforward ways to increase such an ineffable metric as ‘quality’ is to increase the amount of content, especially artwork, as well as the complexity. While the tools to create these assets continue to evolve in parallel with increasing demands (and to a certain extent, driving these demands), Content developers can still only make new assets so fast. Developing these works is a rather specialized skill which requires a large modicum of creativity as well. As such, developing these assets is one of the most expensive parts of creating games. These costs have risen to the degree that barriers to entry in the video game industry are now quite prohibitive. This makes it difficult for small commercial studios and independent developers who have difficulty drumming up the resources to hire content developers to get off the ground.

It also makes life difficult for large developers and publishing studios. The Games Publishing Business, much like the recording industry, is a difficult and stressful business to be in. In the music industry, you have no way of speeding up creativity. The artist will create music at his or her own pace, so you have no real way of knowing when it will be ready. When it is ready, you don’t know if it will be good, and if it is good, you don’t know if the public will go for it. The games industry has mitigated these factors somewhat by sticking to formats which are well established. Publishers are less willing to fork over cash for a completely new idea that doesn’t have established sales potential when they could spend the same money to create a new first-person shooter. If the cost case is the same, they’re in the business of risk management. At the same time, however, completely original ideas are the seeds from which new genres, and thus new profit centers grow. Without fostering an environment in which these new ideas can be fleshed out, Publishers are choking off their own future revenues. What Publishers need is a way to promote methods for independent developers to bring out their new ideas in an inexpensive way, so that they can publish these titles without taking on large risk. Microsoft is already doing this to a certain extent through XNA and XBox Live Arcade. This does not, however, address the issue of expensive assets.

To resolve this issue, enter Wikinomics. There are several large publishing studios who also act as in-house development studios (Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Nintendo). What this means is that they own large amounts of sound and art assets which they are not currently using. What these publishing houses should do is license a large portion of the assets from development studios they own to the public for free under some form of Creative Commons License. The license would allow for commercial works, including derivatives to be created, as long as the original artist and studio were credited in the final production. Access to large volumes of free and fully utilizable content would massively reduce the cost of developing new titles.

Okay, so you probably see why it would be of benefit to indies to have access to all the art assets owned by Microsoft Games (Lionhead, Rare, Ensemble, Bungie, FASA), Electronic Arts (Bullfrog, Origin, Maxis, Westwood, EA Sports), Nintendo, and Ubisoft for no cost, but why would they do this?

Simple. These warehouses of assets are not profit-centers for these companies, but they could be. By opening up these assets, at virtually no cost to themselves, they would stimulate significant growth in the independant games community. These indies would be able to take assets which were professionally developed, modify them to their own needs, and more easily deploy a marketable title. Many of these titles will be new and innovative, and employ gameplay that would be too risky for a major developer to secure funding for. These indies are then going to be looking for someone to publish their titles. And by providing them with all that content, that goes a long way for goodwill towards the publisher. Publishing these titles through more inexpensive mechanisms like Steam or Xbox Live is a low-risk cost to these publishers, and it’s more than likely that some of these new titles might be a major hit, allowing the publisher to thus have turned their old warehoused assets into major profit centers.

Merck did this with pharmacetuical prototypes, and encouraged other major players to join in. It resulted in a major cost savings for everyone involved, as much of the overhead being done simutaneously be each individual company was reduced. I don’t see why this tactic couldn’t work for major development studios as well.

Unfortunately, unless a CEO somewhere has a massive flash of inspiration and drives this initiative, we’re not likely to see it in the near future (Come on Reggie, we’re counting on you now).

Tags: Artwork, Audio, Delivery, Indie, Industry, Publishing by Morphix
2 Comments »

In 2000, Microsoft announced it was going to release a new console gaming system to compete against Nintendo and Sony. At the time, I thought they were out of their minds. Microsoft was at the time, a company I had known only to produce an operating system that, while nearly ubiquitous, was merely okay from a quality standpoint, and an office suite which ran on said platform. I was also perhaps somewhat bitter at them for acquiring Access Software the year before; a move which ended the Tex Murphy series of games, much to my dismay. It was certainly not clear that Microsoft was the type of company who had their hand on the pulse of the game industry. Several years later, I think it’s safe to say that I can retract that position. Microsoft managed to leverage DirectX on their new system, thus making it much easier to develop for the XBox than any other of the systems available at the time. They also leveled the mighty cash war-chest at numerous other high-profile companies (Rare, Bungie), and managed to bring out on the Xbox some of the best received launch titles since Mario. Far from a lucky start, Halo 2 is, years later, still the best selling console game ever (although Gears of War, another Microsoft exclusive, is giving it a run for its money).

Xbox Live

Having earned my respect, after years of delivering a continuously high-quality gaming experience, It is interesting to see what they’re doing now with the 360 and Xbox Live. The Xbox live environment itself has several things that are worth the admission price right off the bat, but Acheivement Points are definitely the drug that sells itself. Microsoft has essentially issued an edict whereby all 360 games and all XLA games have set amounts of points which can be earned by doing things in the game, both on and offline. Some of these tasks are trivialities which are earned easily during normal game play, others are only granted to the most dedicated players. This system has in effect created a standardized system of gamer cred. There have always been those folks who have to get every last bloody note in Banjo-Kazooie, who have to beat every level without losing a life. This has always been relegated I think to the very hardcore, or very obsessed. Even so, there’s never been a facility to show off to your friends how bad ass you are, until this point. Given the popularity of the system, I’m very surprised that Nintendo and Sony have not decided to provide competing point systems, in effect handing Microsoft control of the de facto standard for gamer reputation. What this means is that when a gamer has a choice over which system to buy a game for, all other things being equal, the 360 is the system of choice, as no other system will earn you the publicly accessible respect for completing parts of the game.I think the real draw of Xbox live will not come to a head for another year or so though. There is a slowly growing network of collaborative technologies emerging. This network hasn’t quite coalesced yet, but will firm up by the end of 2007, and I predict by the end of 2008 that some exciting things will be come to fruition.

XNA’s Not an Acronym

The first part of that network is XNA. The Microsoft XNA Framework is a set of tools and runtime environment designed to aid in video game development and deployment. The framework allows independent developers to design both 2D and 3D games from the ground up, and deploy them in both Windows and on the Xbox 360 with minimal code changes. The framework simplifies many aspects of game design, and has a steadily growing community of users. Some issues exist (for example, in order to distribute games you develop for the 360, you presently are required to distribute the entire source code and the user must recompile it), and is seriously lacking documentation for the more advanced functions. Nevertheless, XNA provides a solid beginning to Indie and Homebrew console development on a scale never seen before. Better yet, XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Framework are free to download, although deploying onto an Xbox 360 requires a Creator’s Club Membership, which has an annual fee of $99 (a modest fee).

Torque X

There are several extremely inexpensive tools which have emerged to integrate with XNA. The suite of choice at the moment is GarageGames‘ Torque X. Torque X is a fully functional Game Engine for both 2D and 3D games. The engine is designed to integrate seamlessly with XNA, as well as several other tools offered by GarageGames, such as the Torque Game Engine (the technology behind such big-name hits as Tribes) and the 2D Game Editor Tools included in the Torque Game Builder. The TGB is extremely inexpensive ($100 for Indies, $400 for Commerical), as is the TGE ($150/$750). GarageGames also offers inexpensive content packages to allow you to get your game up and running without waiting for costly art and sound assets to be created.With these tools in hand, the barriers to entry for game development on the 360 have dropped away substantially, making the 360 the platform of choice for independent games developers. The ultra-high end, cutting edge games still lay in the domain of large developers with massive budgets, but for the first time we have the ability to inject fresh independent creativity into the console environment. The only remaining problem is publishing.

XBox Live Arcade

Enter Xbox Live Arcade. XLA is a feature of the XBox Live system whereby gamers can pay to download titles from the system, in a manner similar to Valve’s Steam. The titles offered tend to be smaller, non-feature length games, or ports of older games. Overall, I’m not particularly impressed with the offerings so far (Although there are some tasty ports, such as Alien Hominid and Worms HD, as well as a couple of new gems such as Wik: Fable of Souls and Settlers of Catan). Microsoft is unwilling to allow just anybody to put their games up on XLA, and rightly so. After all, XLA is a platform for Microsoft to make money as well, and it’s a brand for them: They want that brand to be known for its quality. There are a rigorous set of standards a game needs to meet to be considered for introduction on XLA. But those standards don’t necessarily require you to be a big name studio. Microsoft’s DreamBuildPlay initiative is proof positive of this. They want to encourage people to use these tools, and are in a position to take risks with regard to publishing titles over XLA, because the overhead for them to do this is substantially less than traditional publishing channels. In the next two years, once developers have had a chance to play with the tools, and the XLA ecosystem really gets developed, I think you’ll start to see some really neat titles on XLA that are new, dynamic ideas, and aren’t published anywhere else.If Microsoft plays its cards right, it has the opportunity to turn Live Arcade into a fountainhead of high-quality, fresh, and creative gaming, and at little to no expense to itself. At the same time, they can endear themselves to the independent crowd, a group largely bulldozed over by the Juggernaut in the last two decades, and re-market themselves as a dynamic, edgy organization along the likes of Apple and Google (you know, the way they used to be known in the 90s).

Now if they would just open a Microsoft Games Studio in Toronto…

Tags: Indie, Online, Platform by Morphix
No Comments »