Because I follow Indie stuff, I thought I'd bring some news here.
Here is an excerpt from the article by Raigan Burns, co-creator of N+:
"I think the thing with Live Arcade, though, is that I remember the last year and the year before. Two years ago was when we were first talking with Microsoft about doing it, it was really exciting, because Live Arcade had just came out, and they were like, "Oh, it's new. It's not going to be like retail. There's not going to be all this crap. There's going to be all these small, great, fun things."
But now it's exactly the same. There's all these big-budget ones with big publishers making them, and the real problem, I think, is that the same people who are deciding what retail games get greenlit are deciding what Live Arcade games get greenlit.
I guess it's because they have a lot of power that no one has pointed out that that's the primary reason. Those decisions that are ruining Live Arcade... it's like, who greenlit Word Puzzle? Who green-lit that hoverboard game that's just shit?
Nick [Waanders] has this racing... do you know Iron Man Off-Road Racing, like the old arcade game? It's four-player, and a little isometric. Nick made a racing game like that, and Microsoft was like, "Well, racing is too saturated on Live Arcade." But that's because they've greenlit like ten really shitty racing games. There's no good racing games."
And you can read the full interview here, http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17960 .
This stuff interests me because I believe in the future of Independent game developers. I believe that digial delivery systems are the future for them (and the industry). The failures of digital delivery systems are important so that we know what works and what not to do (alienate good independent developers).
