So, another week of absolutely nothing on XBLA. The complete mess of this “department” is becoming more and more obvious as the days go on… with the departure/firing of it’s head a few weeks ago and another exec leaving today.
So, what is the new PR spin that is coming out of the XBLA department? Why, it’s this wonderful video:
That’s right. They put an internally produced video up to explain that even the XBLA team has absolutely no idea what they are doing, and they are running the show.
I don’t recall them saying there would be a new release every Wednesday, just some verbage about Wednesdays being the day they would release new Arcade titles.
IIRC, Paperboy was last week and Root Beer Tapper the week before that.
Um, crackdown came out today. Who fucking cares about an XBLA title this week? they could have xcom up there and I wouldnt bother 'till I get some crack down.
The two guys in the video are Tony Hynes and (my buddy) Chris Paladino. Their job is simply to deliver the news, good or bad – clearly bad news in this case.
They’re “community managers”, not XBLA folk, which means they post blog entries, interact with the podcasting/blog/general communities, etc… So it’s not like the people who made the video are in any way directly responsible for the news itself – only delivering it.
That said, I am very disappointed that there’s no release this week. I think what the XBLA team needs right now is to offer a little transparency into why exactly this happens, not to mention setting better expectations ahead of time.
In this case, they clearly asked for some backlash by giving the impression (implicitly, because they never said every week) that they’d be rolling out those recently-announced 10 titles in a consecutive barrage.
Of course MS wants to put these games out ASAP, so there’s obviously good reasons for the delays, probably related to the 3rd-party developers working on the titles or QA issues. They just need to shed some light on it, because otherwise you get the kind of “OMG WTF THEYR N00BS! I CUUD DO BETTER” nonsense found all over the net.
Oh, and if you read the text right above the video, they make very clear they’re just being silly with the video as a way to break the bad news. It also says they (the community managers) are trying to get more info, and that everyone involved is taking the situation seriously.
I’ve been told that it’s very difficult to work with the Live Arcade team on QA and related issues, and that it takes forever to get feedback / results from them.
Man if they start losing games due issues like this they are screwing up big time. It’s interesting too as doesn’t MS have a sterling rep for working with devs on full DVD release games?
That’s what I’ve always heard. I guess that’s just more evidence, if you needed any, that MS isn’t making XBLA a priority. Which is just a huge mistake, because with more content on the order of Worms, SotN, and Settlers, XBLA could be a license to print money if managed properly.
I believe MS gets more along the lines of 30% of a XBLA games, for what it’s worth.
I’ve also heard that the XBLA team is really feeling the pressure from the gaming community right now, and it’s my understanding that they understand next week will be very important in the eyes of their audience. Let’s home that means we finally get one of the good games on the list.
XBLA is going to have some issues real soon. With Nintendo’s VC pumping out better classics and Sony with better originals, microsoft “avantage” could quickly become a liability.
