WaaghMan said:
No offense, but how exactly the promotion can help XBLIG? I said the same with the IGSU dashboad promotion, and the IGWU one. If you just let people download the advertised game, you're not letting them know there's a whole section called Indie games full of interesting titles.
So, good for the games promoted, no effect to the platform as a whole. End of story.
Well surely there's some percentage of people who saw the ads and became aware of xblig because of those ads and then went to browse the channel. Maybe they saw the ads and were like, "indie games? what?" and then went browsing the dashboard/internet to learn more, or maybe they checked out the dev's website after playing the game and learned about xblig through that, maybe they talked to a friend about it, etc.
And you're not thinking past stage 1. If MS continues to do promotions like these then devs are more likely to release better games for the channel, and get more exposure for the channel (every game has a chance to get press, go viral, advertise, etc.)
FunInfusedGames said:
A top rated approach that takes just the most recent stuff would be a better automatically created listing... for instance it would display the top rated games released in the past 30 days.
I don't think showing the Top Rated or Top Downloaded page first would be a good solution as those lists so often don't change and Top Downloaded would change even less if you present it first.
I don't think the top downloaded would change less if it was first, I could actually make a case for the opposite, but either way I think the difference would be very small.
It's also pretty dynamic, especially compared to top rated.
Look back at the archives here, all green & red text are changes (only time there were blue-only days was when the list was frozen, but that's not a problem anymore thanks to the 7 day change). And take a look at the top downloaded now, there's new games in the top ten all the time.
So, why do yall want a new list that's based on ratings instead of sales? If the top rated games were better than the top selling games, why aren't they selling as much? Seems like the more hardcore gamers who post on forums/blogs are buying the top rated games, while a bigger demographic on xbox live are buying the top downloaded games. This group obviously outweighs you guys, yet you want another list that caters to your interests instead of theirs? And it should be presented first?
Why not use xbox.com,
sort by release date and pick out some games that have above x stars? You don't even have to click on the games to see the ratings, they're right there. You can do the same on the dashboard, it just takes a little longer, but usually the box art and title is enough to tell me whether or not I might be interested in the game.
And if you want hand-picked new releases, again: Kotaku's Favorites. If you say this isn't very visible to newcomers,
read my last post. It's visible on my tv without any scrolling, it might take one or two presses on the joystick to notice it on other tv's. But top downloaded & top rated are better for newcomers anyway, and before they've soaked those lists up, by the time they're hungry for another list, they'll have noticed Kotaku's Favorites by then, or maybe they'll have noticed you can browse by genre and sort by ratings/downloads if they're just
so hungry for new games like you guys seem to be. So I really don't think there's a problem here. Everything is fine, and if MS is going to promote games like this, great.
