At the advent of the Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft imposed strict rules regarding how big game downloads could be. If a publisher's game exceeded 50 MB of data, it couldn't be put up for sale. Later, that size limit was lifted to 150 MB. As you may have noticed, that restriction no longer exists. Shadow Complex was nearly 1GB in size while the recently released C&C 3 Commander's Challenge pack clocked in at 2GB. Have all restrictions been thrown out of the window?
The answer is more or less.
In a meeting with Microsoft's Scott Austin, director of digital games, IGN was told that 2GB is the limit now, but that isn't due to any restrictions imposed by Microsoft. The 2GB limit is a technical limitation of the system being used. Games on Demand, a section of the Xbox Live Marketplace where you can buy full retail games to download, uses a different file structure and so that limitation does not exist.
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
