Ripples from a recent post...
Tuesday, July 29 2008
Well, after one of my recent posts made CVG and Kotaku headlines, it seems that Microsoft felt compelled to respond to my issues. I agree that offering easy ways to select games by top-rated/higests-sellers on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace is a great way to help consumers sort between the gems and the monkey poo. In the end, I think the media picked up on the wrong parts of my blog post. My key point was that there is no consumer-oriented mechanism in place to help consumers rate/comment on the games. You certainly can't do that on the XNA Creator's Club site, nor can you on Xbox.com. My emphasis here is that the community games approach is different from Xbox LIVE Arcade games, and that a new way of enabling developers to publish their games on Xbox LIVE warrants enabling consumers a way to comment on those published games. We will know more when the fall Xbox dashboard update comes out.
3 comment(s)
All it needs is for the Community Games (and for that matter the XBLA games) to be rateable by the users. Sort by rating and be done. If it works for youtube et al, then why not here?
Well, watching YouTube videos is free for one, whereas we're talking about selling Community Games, so you'll probably get after-sales ratings only (no sale equals no rating). Secondly creating a typical YouTube video takes a fraction of the effort that goes into creating a good game, so an impartial and thrustworthy rating is much more important. And finally, does it really work that well for YouTube? I mean, this probably sums up the overall quality of the comments pretty well:
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the Community Games user ratings to just work, but I'd feel better about it if MS would at least put a few interns on basic certification or do *something*, for the developer's sake.
But let's hope the fall dashboard update proves me completely wrong :)
Ideally I think there should be some kind of light-weight certification in addition to consumer reviews to help good games stand out. Perhaps even stick certified ones into a different section on the channel.
Aside from the obvious benefit for the players, I think this would be a good thing for developers as well. Publishing your game should be a milestone, instead of just putting your game out there and hoping it doesn't end up with the Pong and SpaceWar clones.
I guess we'll have to put our trust into the "real viral appeal", which in my mind comes down to a cross between hoping someone will pick it up and spamming.
Ps good to read you're getting settled again and that the gas prices are low :)