XSReviews.co.uk

Xbox Live Arcade Games Quality is on the up

Microsoft has been crowing off about how well they think XBLA is progressing and developing; appparently the quality of the games is going up. However, one upside (for the developers) and downside (for the customers), is that the average price is also creeping upwards.

“If you look at Live Arcade, and do the math, and look at the publicly available sales numbers, you can see that average prices on XBLA have crept up over the last few years, which has been an interesting trend because on some app markets there’s been a race to zero as fast as possible,” said Xbox Live Arcade portfolio director Chris Charla.

“We’ve seen a little bit of the opposite happening,” he continued. “I don’t really know where prices are going to go – ultimately, that’s set by the market – but it has been really gratifying to see that people are willing to a premium price for digital content [sic].”

While there are more and more games showing up with the $15 price tag, Mr Charla did say that the quality was on the rise, so people should be willing to pay that little bit more.

“Sometimes, when [developers] talk about Live Arcade they’re like, ‘We want to do a boxed quality game on Live Arcade’, and I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’ I can point at a bunch of 38 and 42 and 56 metacritic scoring boxed games, so it actually kind of pisses me off.” He went on to say that games like Castle Crashers were some of the best available and easily comparable to mainstream products.

Industry