There have been some recent interviews about this. A few factors. First, major publishers weren’t immediately on-board with Live Arcade. Instert your favorite conspiracy theory (mine is that bean counters have to be dragged kicking and screaming into new business models unless there are some serious dollar signs flashed in front of their faces.
Second, a couple games are taking longer than they thought. Street Fighter 2 is hard for them to get working well over Live, being that it’s a port of a non-network-aware arcade game (there’s actual arcade code and emulation in there). The free sponsored Texas Hold’em had a sponsorship problem, which I think they just about have worked out but the lawyers need to dot Is and cross Ts.
Third, it’s just bigger and better than MS anticipated, and it’s taking some time to catch up. They honestly expected a relatively small number of Arcade games at first because they didn’t anticipate the hardcore would love 'em so much, and the 360 is still a hardcore item until the price drops more. Turns out the hardcore loves Arcade, trial-to-full conversions are higher than predicted, etc.
So now major publishers want to make Arcade games, they want to put their old classics on Arcade, and independants are beating down the doors. Microsoft doesn’t just want a flood of direct 20-year-old arcade ports, though. They want updated graphics, global leaderboards, online play, etc. Ala Gauntlet. This stuff can take 6-9 months to make, albeit with a smaller team than a full boxed AAA title.
So I think more Arcade games are definitely coming, it’s just we’re in a 6-month lag between everyone realizing how awesome it is and starting up Arcade projects, and their eventual release. The guys in charge have said that the “floodgates will open soon.” Hope so! I want my Lumines!
Questionable prices for expansion content. This started with the uproar over horse armor, now we have GR:AW with essentially $15 for 4 new maps.
And some Oblivion add-ons of dubious quality. Yeah. This sucks. Microsoft actually doesn’t set the price for the content. I don’t know what their cut is (maybe it’s variable depending on who hosts the file, if publishers are capable of hosting it themselves). I think it’s critically important in these early months of Marketplace that gamers set a precedant and show publishers that we won’t pay these rates. If a $15 map pack bombs, they won’t charge $15 next time. Unfortunately, I think gamers are griping and saying it’s a rip-off and then buying it anyway. :(
Slow to get demos up on the marketplace. This happened with GR:AW and some others. Now Prey has a PC demo out and no 360 demo despite the 360 demo supposedly having been handed off to MS.
Agreed. The testing is taking too long. I know part of it is that they have to test a bunch of languages and locations, then seed the file to the distribution servers around the world, and stuff like that. But this stuff needs to be better coordinated between the publishers and Microsoft, so they have time to test and put out the demo more quickly.
Ongoing bandwidth issues. Downloads still seem to take way way too long, especially the day that new content is released.
Agreed. This is hit and miss - sometimes on a “big” day people will have their download go fast, and others will have it go slow. They certainly haven’t solved this spotty intermittant problem, and with the size of and demand for demos, and the growing size of add-on content, it’s going to be more important.
Not to mention that the 360 userbase will double worldwide by the end of the year. Demand is going to go up on all fronts - more content to be had, bigger content, and more people to get it. Microsoft is capable of solving this problem, perhaps more than any other company (Windows Update is fast as hell all the time). They need to get on it and do it before September when better games start coming out and sales go up.
Of course, it just goes to show that this kind of thing is tremendously hard. I really am curious to see how well it goes with Sony and Nintendo, two companies that have less experience in the whole “major online network” thing. Will they nail it and shame Microsoft at their own game?
