New Xbox LIVE Dashboard changes remove Xbox LIVE Indie games from search results and have caused some consternation on the side of indie game devs. The latest round of changes from Microsoft also relegate the games to a Specialty Shops area and lumps them together with other non-games available for purchase. Examples of the non-game bits include Avatar items, DLC for Rock Band, Lips and Guitar Hero as well as the Game Room (anyone use that?). Almost like saying that Xbox LIVE Indie Games aren’t full games themselves.
The search changes will exclude the games from search results when keying on title or genre and will now be herded only into the aforementioned Specialty Shops.
Many developers are up in arms over the changes and have stated poor sales are the result of the changes as well as excluding them into an area that is not made for games themselves.
In essence the new dashboard moves them into the area where you can buy everything but games, almost segregating them out of the loop in what looks like a purposeful move to help bolster larger Xbox LIVE titles be cutting down on the amount of competition that is found in search results.
GDN will happily support and XBLIG developer by publishing game announcements and updates to help get the word out about their games. Feel free to drop your press releases and announcements into the GDN Newsroom via newsfile [at] Gamersdailynews.com
We are also more than happy to do reviews of XBLIG titles whenever available (same email address). While we cannot cover every title in news and reviews we can try to help bolster the independent game development community by offering as much coverage as we can handle. We try to maintain a close relationship with independent developers as we believe that some of the best games can come from the smallest of studios. Games like the recently reviewed Nimbus, which received a 9.5/10, show that there is a vast amount of creativity in the indie game community and that those games can have as high if not higher production values than the big box AAA titles that spend more on marketing than on game creation.
Granted, we are not condemning the large AAA titles either, everything has it’s place in the gaming world no matter if your game cost $200 or $20M.
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67 days ago
Man, that’s low. Some of my favorite stuff is on the XBLIG catalog. To be fair there’s a lot of truly awful garbage in there too, but doing the equivalent of shoving all of them in the basement (more than they already were) like this is not going to help the good stuff come to light...