Indie Games Win Xbox Live Victory

Breaking news... Microsoft has moved the Indie games category back into the games section on Xbox Live, after the tar and feathers were being prepared. Interestingly, this was done quietly, and not with a PR blast... even after Microsoft tried to defend the original move out of the games category.

Kudos to Microsoft for responding so quickly to an obvious mistake. A press release would probably be a good idea in order to put Microsoft's reasoning on the proper slant, at least from Microsoft's perspective.

Microsoft Vs. Indies

Microsoft has rolled out a new Xbox 360 dashboard, mostly to support Kinect and to look spiffier. But they've also made changes beyond the cosmetic, and in the process have ignited a firestorm among indie game developers. It seems Microsoft has moved the indie games out of the game store (where they have been, and you'd logically expect to find games). Now indie games are stuffed into the Specialty Shops, right next to the Avatar Clothing store. Seems eminently logical, doesn't it? But for some reason indie game developers aren't feeling the love.

Some developers feel that Microsoft was just stringing them along, allowing indie games as a way to get major publishers to support digital distribution. Now that they've got the major publishers trying it out, there's no need to clutter things up by allowing little tiny developers to use up space. Microsoft points out that hey, now they're showing the top 50 titles and not just the top 20 titles. Yeah, counter indie game developers, if anyone can even find the Indie Game store when it's not even with the rest of the games.

Developers who have been working on games for Xbox Live  and were getting near to release are especially angry, now that it looks like their games won't get much exposure. Many were hoping that they could move their games to Windows Phone 7, hoping for some strong connection between the two platforms. That may still happen, but Microsoft hasn't really said much about that.

I think Microsoft is making a mistake by sidelining the independent games. While the new dashboard is a little spiffier, it still makes it hard to find games. Much like iTunes and the Android Market and PSN and WiiWare... they all try different interfaces, and nobody's found a really good one yet. So it's up to the developer/publisher to try and get customers to come to the game. Not optimal, especially when you have tens of thousands of games to compete with on some platforms.

This incident also illustrates the dangers of dealing with a distribution channel. Sometimes the big dog scratches (like Apple or Microsoft) and the fleas get thrown off. Then again, if you didn't deal with a big distributor, you'd be left in the trackless wilderness of the Internet hoping for customers to stumble across your little game. Which brings us right back to marketing...

XBox Live Arcade Analysis, and some PSN

In a world where speculation is often passed along as truth, it's nice to get a dose of data now and then. Here's some from XBox Live Arcade: April's numbers. It's interesting to note some comparisons between XBox Live and PSN; the number of players for Capcom's Final Fight was actually higher for PSN. Seems like the price drop for the PS3 has now made the unit quite competitive. It doesn't hurt that you get a Blu-Ray player in your PS3, either. (Now there's some upcoming news about PSN debuting a premium network soon, to compete even more with XBox Live... cross-game chatting, free games, downloads of full games, and best of all, cloud-based game saves. Yum.)

As you can see from the list, the top games can hit over 1 million players... and then there are many games in the low thousands. Still, it's a wide range, and there's plenty of room for moving up in the numbers if you can do some effective marketing. Major Nelson promoted one game as a 33% off sale for one day, and that boosted numbers by about 6,000 over what would have been expected.

The marketplace for downloads continues to evolve, and the marketing tools tend to lag behind. It's really necessary to put some creativity into the marketing efforts, not just the game development.