Hear them ROAR!
The land of the Avatar games is on your Xbox. If you haven't found this fabled land. Then you need to get yourself over to the Games Download section and choose Indie games. In there you will find all manner of Avatar games. Created by talented and not so talented people. Games that will make you laugh, or wince or cry out loud.
Xbox Live arcade (XBLA) is the big brother of Xbox Live Indie Games(XBLIG). It has a lot of quality games on it. Games that have been vetted by microsoft and then put through some pretty rigorous testing and work. These games are professionally created and usually show that in all aspects. The Indie games are not so heavily tested. Or vetted in any way.
What does this mean? What are ya waffling on about?
The land of the Avatars is popular. Most Avatar games seem to be garnering a considerable amount of downloads (even if some have not got a good sell thru). so what we know is that Xbox owners really love to play games with their Avatars in them. Not really a surprise. The surprise is the lack of choice in the XBLA area. The reason is pretty simple. It takes a lot of time to create an XBLA title, whereas an XBLIG title can be created from the examples in a week or so. So XBLA cannot hope to bring out a large number of games featuring the lovely little Avatars. But XBLIG can (also MS has several restrictions for XBLA titles pertaining to lots of stuff like leaderboards and presence etc). For XBLIG once again, there are no real restrictions. I am sure if there were we would have a lot less Avatar, or any other games to peruse on the service .
Why do I care?
All developers on the Xblig service are seeing the large download numbers, on some really crap games. It makes it hard not to jump on that bandwagon and create something. I myself am considering this as a form of advertising or marketing. It would get my company name out there to maybe 40K potential buyers. That is an impressive number. If i can then lead them to my other games of better gameplay and quality, then is this virtual advertising? Would it work?
At the moment i am looking for funds to finish my current game in a way that will make me more proud. I will be pondering my options as i go along this next couple of months though for sure.
Good Night and Avatar well.
Note: Of course some people think that MS are already being over restrictive on it's rules for Avatars. This however is MS decision, and i guess they have good reasons for controlling them. Though it does make reveiwing games with Avatars more difficult.
Friday, May 28, 2010
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This statement (and a few others) is completely untrue: "For XBLIG once again, there are no real restrictions. I am sure if there were we would have a lot less Avatar games to peruse on the service."
ReplyDeleteThere is, in fact, a rather detailed list of restrictions as it pertains to Avatars in XBLIG. You apparently don't spend much time reading the play test forums, or you would know better.
thanks fro reading my blog.
ReplyDeleteMy point wasn't about Avatar restrictions, though i see why could think that from the way i wrote it. I mean't that XBLA has a lot of restrictions on their XBLA syste, like leaderboards and such. Mainly they have a very large and in depth set of guidelines etc befroe a game can go live into XBLA. Our paltry restrictions for making and getting XBLIG games out however is very small in comparison.
And nope. I never read the forums, they are full of interesting information. ;)
Da Voodoochief