Newsbrief: Microsoft has increased its Achievement and Gamerscore limits for Xbox Live Arcade releases for the first time since the features launched, doubling the amount of points developers can reward to players.
Achievements and Gamerscore points are often used to motivate players to complete specific goals, keeping them engaged and making them continue playing games longer than they would have if there weren't any Achievements.
Developers were previously limited to offering 20 Achievements and 200 Gamerscore points in their XBLA games, but starting next month, they can offer 30 different Achievements and 400 Gamerscore points in their new titles.
According to a policy change noticed posted by Microsoft's Xbox Live director of programming Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, the Gamerscore increase will be required for all new XBLA titles starting June.
I'm guessing this is an attempt to bolster flagging XBLA sales.
EDIT: I'm guessing that the recent XBLA House Party bombed big time. Low review scores (highest rated game has an average of 78% on Gamerankings.com) and a lack of pre-release hype probably didn't help any.
I have no trouble finding the new Arcade releases. I am not a fan of the new interface either, but once you have used it a while you can navigate where you need to go. The cloud storage seems to slow the whole interface down which I find very annoying.
The problem with arcade for me is the latest releases are not to my tastes and are over priced. If you are going to release a downloadable game for $15 it better appeal to almost everyone. Also, the lack of any decent sales has hurt XBox Live Arcade sales as well in my opinion. There is practically zero hype for Live arcade lately.
The menu system certainly doesn't help, first off the games tab should not be 3rd to last, it should be right next to the home tab. It is sad when people still prefer the power button menu system that came with the original release over every dashboard they have had for the system. Is it really that difficult to create a dashboard using common sense?
I also think some of the early successes like Castle Crashers and Braid caused a flood of publishers and developers wanting to put their non-unique nor high quality game on the service which tends to drown out the higher quality games. The service still provides some really good games, the most recent being Gotham City Imposters, but people just don't seem to take notice anymore.
Are achievements that important anymore? They sound good initially but now-a-days you either are addicted to them or you honestly just don't care anymore. They could replace the system with unlockables or just about anything that does more than inflate that score and most people wouldn't even take notice. I guess the dedicated though buy more games right and care more about gamer score?
I thought that, similar to Sony, MS determines the total achievement points by the scope of the game? So an XBLA game, if as expansive as a disc game, can have the same amount of achievements and points?
In any case, this should encourage developers to build XBLA games that are closer in scope to disc games in this digital download movement.
EDIT: I'm guessing that the recent XBLA House Party bombed big time. Low review scores (highest rated game has an average of 78% on Gamerankings.com) and a lack of pre-release hype probably didn't help any.
The problem with arcade for me is the latest releases are not to my tastes and are over priced. If you are going to release a downloadable game for $15 it better appeal to almost everyone. Also, the lack of any decent sales has hurt XBox Live Arcade sales as well in my opinion. There is practically zero hype for Live arcade lately.
The menu system certainly doesn't help, first off the games tab should not be 3rd to last, it should be right next to the home tab. It is sad when people still prefer the power button menu system that came with the original release over every dashboard they have had for the system. Is it really that difficult to create a dashboard using common sense?
I also think some of the early successes like Castle Crashers and Braid caused a flood of publishers and developers wanting to put their non-unique nor high quality game on the service which tends to drown out the higher quality games. The service still provides some really good games, the most recent being Gotham City Imposters, but people just don't seem to take notice anymore.
In any case, this should encourage developers to build XBLA games that are closer in scope to disc games in this digital download movement.