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| Erosion of discovery, not sales |
The new dashboard is bad for discovery. Both XBLA and XBLIG are now approximately 1,000 buttons presses away. There are no genre filters for XBLIG, meaning new releases get dumped into one big chronological list.
This makes browsing for games less straightforward, and makes it less likely that anyone will ever stumble across XBLIG's new releases list in the first place.
The big, big difference is the fact that XBLIG titles show up in the Bing search results. If you know the title of a game, you can get to it with minimum fuss, especially if you have Kinect. Gone are the troubles of "I wanted to download your game, but I couldn't find it." That's not a made-up quote, as any XBLIG developer will tell you.
The net result of this (if users adopt Bing search) is that games good enough to have garnered press attention or made by developers professional enough to have indulged in marketing will be much easier to find. As an added bonus, consumers won't be exposed to the deluge of hobbyist and me-too titles that do so much to drag XBLIG's reputation through the effluent-riddled mud.
If people don't know about your game then it's either not good enough to get press attention, or not good enough for people to recommend to their friends. I don't believe Joe Average ever stumbled across XBLIGs and so I don't expect a drop in footfall. Even if there is, it'll be in line with that which XBLA experiences (that's the next-door shelf): hardly a bad place to be.
SpynDoctor, a talented developer I have great respect for, was tweeting in an accusative manner that XBLIG is second class. It's still next to XBLA, the shelf where all of Microsoft's online money comes from. The shelf that doesn't give Microsoft constant PR headaches. The shelf that doesn't have titles so bad that they make a negative impact on the consumer. The shelf that isn't the abandoned orphan offspring who's forward-thinking parent has long since moved on.
Be thankful that Microsoft's premium clients (XBLA publishers) have not thrown their toys out of the pram when they discovered that XBLIGs will show up in the search results alongside XBLA games.
I wonder how many idiots have to name their XBLIG titles after XBLA games before that decision gets reversed?
Besides, if you're that bothered about making more money, upload a PC port of your game to IndieCity.
2 comments:
I agree with you when you say good games will be easier to find through word of mouth with the new search functions. I do disagree with you when you say bad games will be forgotten and get no sales. Look at the related games of any game you own and chances are there is some old, random XBLIG. These games are normally not on the top rated or top downloaded list. Those games will get picked up more now.
Since the top rated and top downloaded are so hard to find, people will not download games as much off of that list. Therefore good games will have to rely on word of mouth from a friend or two as well as the related games section. I have already heard from devs with games on the top lists that sales have dropped for those games, but raised for older games due to the related lists. That means a lot of discovery is through the related games tab.
This means that some bad games will still get a lot of publicity by being a random choice for a related game. The top lists being hidden is a terrible thing that does need fixing.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
It's good point you raise about the 'Top' lists.
Arguably its a good thing for most developers that they're gone. Top 10 lists create a self-fulfilling prophecy of popularity that snowballs over time.
It's bad for consumers that they're gone, but I like the idea that games need to rely on word-of-mouth.
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