XBLA is "so conservative"

Zee-3's co-creator Ste Pickford believes that digital distribution services like Xbox Live Arcade are still too conservative and inaccessible for independent developers.

"Potentially, for people like us it's brilliant, but at the moment I think the door is closed," he told GamesIndustry.biz in a recent interview. "There are very few people allowed to release games and I think it really comes down to who you know, and whether you're friends with the gatekeeper at Microsoft."

Increased development costs for next-generation titles, he believes, are forcing studios to rely more heavily on publishers' vast coffers, decreasing the amount of independent games being created.

For his UK studio, making his games available for download isn't just another option, it's a necessity.

"For us it's not just the best way of getting a game out, it's the only way. I think it's a great thing and I think it'll replace retail," he added. "The cost of development is just too high to compete as a business any more."

However, there's light at the end of the tunnel and he believes there's room for smaller budget games to co-exist with AAA titles in the next-generation.

"The rise in Internet distribution, indie games and things like XBLA has opened the door again and allowed smaller budget games to exist and succeed."

via eurogamer

XBLA is great for indie devs. best example, the Behemoth, responsible for a once popular indie flash-based game, Alien Hominid and the soon-to-be released Castle Crashers from same dev group. now with the increase three-fold for the game size, games should be better in terms of length and quality. i guess Microsoft just needs to open their arms to these upcoming devs and allow their creativeness to flourish in XBLA.

I have to agree with the thread title. If we are lucky we see 1 new game a week, but usually I am not interested in it or I am interested but I try the demo only to find out that it is a piece of junk. Over the last year M$ showed us previews of some of the games in magazines and on the internet. But where are these great games now. I would gladly buy some more XBLA titles, I already have the ones that are any good and a few crappy ones too.