8 Dec, 2011
There are some rumblings in the indie dev forums about the latest dashboard update. While most people will probably be generally fine with the update, some devs are understandably frustrated that it now takes 17 button presses to get to indie games on XBLA.
Naturally, that can be a problem when it only takes 8 button presses to get to most Arcade and On Demand titles. Now, in theory the Bing search should help find some of these indie titles, but this is how one developer summed it up:
The Bing search is a nice feature, but it is only go to help when the user already knows about the game. To take advantage of this (e.g. have a viral game) one will still requires a solid base of user purchasing their games via traditional traffic patterns (game marketplace -> indies). The burying of the indie marketplace will hurt the sales of games that do not go viral and it also severely decreases the utility of the Bing search. If a game can get a solid base of users, then I do think that game can capitalize on the search. Regardless of how many clicks it takes to get the indie marketplace, the fact remains that it takes more than to find the other games (xbox,arcade, and on-demand) and the visibility of indie market place is very low.
The indie games are also not divided up by genre, so if you’re looking for an indie RPG, it will be that much harder to find a game you want. There also appear to be two indie game “sections”. One of those you can only reach via a rotating ad in the Games Marketplace, which has the Kotaku list, Contest Winners, Newest Releases and Top Downloaded, and the other is by going to Game Types -> Indie where it is just a huge list of all the indie games dumped into one place. Weird.
Hopefully Microsoft takes some time to fix this up, as they’ve had to do in past attempts to bury indie games.
[via gamersmint]
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