http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17960
Oh man, they get on pretty much everyone, but MS receives most of the slam jams.
And that's not even all the funny quotes. These guys deliver brutal real talk. I love it.
Oh man, they get on pretty much everyone, but MS receives most of the slam jams.
Was there a lot of waiting around? That's what I've heard from some other people. I don't know if it's gotten smoother since then.
RB: We've been waiting a month and a half.
Mare Sheppard: Since it's been through cert, yeah.
NW: Yeah, that has been a bit of a wait.
That's what I was talking about. A month and a half is not too bad, compared to other stories I've heard, like three months and more.
RB: That's true. We actually dodged a bullet. The only reason why we weren't even more bumped is because we spent all kinds of money on the launch party, which was last week, because it was supposed to be coming out the week before. Also they're doing a postmortem [at GDC]... they are doing one of a game that isn't even out yet. [The game debuted on the Wednesday of GDC.]
NW: It's only by one day.
RB: The guy at Microsoft was like, "Because of those things, I was able to prevent you from being further bumped." It was like, "FYI, you could've been even more screwed!"
NW: This is where you really feel being small. You see this giant wave coming toward you and you can't do anything about it. You've got to move.
The thing that struck me I was hearing was that it sounded like he wanted to put the retail model into the downloads, where you don't get to try before you buy.
NW: No, I love the demo. I think the way it should work is that it forces the games to be good, because you can't just rely on marketing. Marketing will get people to download the demo, but it's not going to get people to pay for it.
Then again, when you look at how many games are selling, like, who's buying Pinball FX? How many games have you bought on Xbox Live Arcade, seriously?
RB: Doom, Geometry Wars, Pac-Man, and one more.
NW: Same here. I can count them on one hand.
RB: There are only five or six good games.
MS: You bought Carcassonne, didn't you?
RB: No, Carcassonne was free. There was one more that we bought. There are okay games, but like with Alien Hominid, we have the Gamecube version. A lot of the games that are worth getting on Live Arcade aren't the originals. Like Pac-Man CE, it's awesome. And Geometry Wars is really good.
NW: To come back to the demo, I've tried a lot of games.
RB: We've tried every... there's like 90 games on PartnerNet, and not a lot of them...
MS: Very few of them we'd purchase.
NW: Yeah. The whole "try the demo and buy your game or not" is the perfect system to weed out games that are shit. The problem is, on Xbox Live Arcade, like retail space, they limit it so much. They should open it up and let people go, you know?
Nintendo has been suggesting that WiiWare is going to be very open.
RB: That's what they said to us, but then they wouldn't explain how that works.
But I don't trust YouTube ratings or number of views or anything like that. If there were searching and tags and stuff, and if you could see what your friends like, that would be good.
NW: Which is part of why that's such a big deal in Xbox Live Arcade, seeing what your friends are playing and stuff like that.
RB: I think the thing with Live Arcade, though, is that I remember the last year and the year before. Two years ago was when we were first talking with Microsoft about doing it, it was really exciting, because Live Arcade had just came out, and they were like, "Oh, it's new. It's not going to be like retail. There's not going to be all this crap. There's going to be all these small, great, fun things."
But now it's exactly the same. There's all these big-budget ones with big publishers making them, and the real problem, I think, is that the same people who are deciding what retail games get greenlit are deciding what Live Arcade games get greenlit.
I guess it's because they have a lot of power that no one has pointed out that that's the primary reason. Those decisions that are ruining Live Arcade... it's like, who greenlit Word Puzzle? Who green-lit that hoverboard game that's just shit?
Nick has this racing...do you know Iron Man Off-Road Racing, like the old arcade game? It's four-player, and a little isometric. Nick made a racing game like that, and Microsoft was like, "Well, racing is too saturated on Live Arcade." But that's because they've greenlit like ten really shitty racing games. There's no good racing games.
They have that Yaris game.
RB: Oh my god. Exactly! That's the whole thing. They all suck. It's like, when we started out, we were excited, just like with N. There were 30 games on Live Arcade. If N was one of them, it would stand out. Now there's like a hundred games, and they're all shit.
MS: People are used to seeing crap on there.
Well, there's some stuff in there.
RB: Oh no, but there's a lot of like, "It's people walking out of a door!" because that was new then. But that's been superseded to the point where you can't do it anymore. I wish... was it you who came up with the idea? Like, why don't they split-fork it so that there's Live Arcade Retro and Live Arcade Original titles? That would eliminate 50 of the hundred things you have to support.
NW: I think that would help anyway. The way you sort through games right now is... they didn't change it.
RB: It's still better than Wii, where it takes five minutes to load each three games or whatever, and it doesn't remember where you were.
They also don't have a hard drive.
RB: Yeah, I don't know how WiiWare is going to work for that. That doesn't make any sense.
RB: That's another thing. We wanted to put our Gamerpics and themes, like the N+ ones, for free, because we figured, "Who even buys themes?" It's not worth 500 sales. Why not everyone have it for free?
Because then it's good as marketing, and it's people who are fans who get something. It's like, everyone wins. But apparently they have a policy where you're not allowed to. But apparently that's a lie, because you can get Halo...
MS: The Live Marketplace page says, "Some of these you can get for free, and some of these will set you back a few."
NW: You can get Halo themes for free and Grand Theft Auto themes for free.
RB: Oh, really?
I imagine the reason those are free is because Rockstar paid for free themes. I'm not sure.
MS: But it's not an option for us. Just blanket not an option. It's so superficial.
RB: It seems retarded to charge. Who buys those? Why not make it... how much money are they making? It's like a hundred dollars.
MS: Then again, I guess they're pretty desperate for money these days. (Dang :lol)
RB: If they changed the 60-watt bulbs in their offices to 40, they'll make like ten times more money than if they made all the themes for free.
NW: That's awesome. I like that.
And that's not even all the funny quotes. These guys deliver brutal real talk. I love it.
