For many Xbox 360 owners, Microsoft,s Live Arcade offers the opportunity to download and try out games before purchase. According to the official site, “Arcade is perfect for the hardcore gamer who’s looking for bite-sized entertainment, or for a casual player looking to get into the game. The games offered in the Xbox Live Arcade come from a wide variety of genres, including puzzle games, retro arcade favorites, action games, card & board titles, and more. New games are released frequently on the Xbox Live Arcade, creating an ever-growing portfolio of titles for players to choose from each month.”
The popularity of Live Arcade has grown, but Microsoft,s claim that “new games are released frequently” isn,t often enough for some in the Xbox 360 community. To address these concerns, Peter Moore, vice president of Interactive Entertainment at the Big M, gave his explanation in a recent interview with Edge magazine by commenting:
"Here’s what happened – people didn’t believe that Arcade was going to fly. So we went round a year and a half ago as we were doing the final plans for launching 360, and told our publishing friends that here’s what we think is really cool idea, where you could make games for hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of tens of millions, and at very low risk, but people didn’t believe it. And we released it and it blew the doors down. Now all of a sudden we’re in this phase where Sega, Namco, Konami, Midway… they want some of that. But we do have an important quality bar in place – we could probably throw 300 games up there quickly, and we are trying to get the independent guys going as well. It’s almost going to be like Pop Idol, where someone will pop out suddenly – Geometry Wars is a great example. But I love this forum, whether it’s profitable or not, this platform for indie developers, for four or five guys to put $100,000 into it, and we’ll publish it and see what happens.”
Live Arcade is primarily aimed at the casual gamer, but in doing so, questions arise as to losing the hard core gamer with this lighter content. Moore said that it wasn,t a concern because the content is aimed for a general audience. He said, “I didn’t expect Live Arcade to be for gamers, I thought maybe for their girlfriends, mums and sisters – but it’s for everybody… it’s clear that everybody plays Arcade, everybody wants to figure out how to get the Pacifist Achievement in Geometry Wars, everybody wants to figure out Zuma’s easiest way for racking up Achievements. It’s clear that it’s an addictive catalogue right now that will only get better with time, and that’s as much for my wife as for my 20-year-old son, who’s really into Marble Blast Ultra.”
With the phenomenal success of Xbox Live and its related online offerings such as Live Arcade and Live Marketplace, Sony and Nintendo have stated that they will also be offering similar services as well. The commitment by the Big Three in establishing online gaming services and downloadable content is another step to what some industry watchers say is the beginning of the switch from traditional boxed game software to the digital distribution of games.
