Awakening
Active Member
I've just bought an Xbox 360 (because all my friends got one) and one of the best features in the Xbox Live Arcade. I can download a demo directly to the hard drive and play it. If I like the demo I can instantly buy the whole game, from within the game itself. While most games are priced a bit high I have bought a few already. We kind of got this already with the appstore but I wonder how it will work exactly.
XBLA takes this one step further though. It offers both online multiplayer and online leaderboards. Combine these two features with the friends system means that I can easily play games with others or invite my friends to a private game but I can also compare my score with my friends or see how I stand compared to all the other players. I really like they way they have done it in Toy Soldiers (great game, worth 1200 points!) where I can see my score for each difficulty for every level compared to my friends directly in the level select menu (and compete against them) but I can also look around the overall leaderboards. The game also sums up the total score (as well as money collected and enemies killed) to really show who is the best. I don't know if a total gamer score (all achievement scores from all your games) is a good idea or not but using a similar system as the leader boards it would be easy to implement achievements in games and have people comparing their achievements against each other in games that does not have scores.
Combining these features together would increase the incentive for people to buy new games rather then just playing emulators and open source ports. If someone buys a game they like it is also possible that they will convince their friends to buy it so they can compare scores and play against each other. It would also be a way to combat piracy because if you haven't bought the game through the appstore you would not have access to the online multiplayer or the leaderboards. I believe both these things will be of interest for developers, as well as not having to provide for online services on their own. I have a very simple board game that I would love to code for online play because I have no idea where to start on an AI since I don't even know how to play it well (imagine Chess or Go but with no active players), the game would benefit greatly from an online ranking system so new players are not matched against experienced players. Who knows, I might even code my soon to be published card game, that would be great fun to play online.
XBLA takes this one step further though. It offers both online multiplayer and online leaderboards. Combine these two features with the friends system means that I can easily play games with others or invite my friends to a private game but I can also compare my score with my friends or see how I stand compared to all the other players. I really like they way they have done it in Toy Soldiers (great game, worth 1200 points!) where I can see my score for each difficulty for every level compared to my friends directly in the level select menu (and compete against them) but I can also look around the overall leaderboards. The game also sums up the total score (as well as money collected and enemies killed) to really show who is the best. I don't know if a total gamer score (all achievement scores from all your games) is a good idea or not but using a similar system as the leader boards it would be easy to implement achievements in games and have people comparing their achievements against each other in games that does not have scores.
Combining these features together would increase the incentive for people to buy new games rather then just playing emulators and open source ports. If someone buys a game they like it is also possible that they will convince their friends to buy it so they can compare scores and play against each other. It would also be a way to combat piracy because if you haven't bought the game through the appstore you would not have access to the online multiplayer or the leaderboards. I believe both these things will be of interest for developers, as well as not having to provide for online services on their own. I have a very simple board game that I would love to code for online play because I have no idea where to start on an AI since I don't even know how to play it well (imagine Chess or Go but with no active players), the game would benefit greatly from an online ranking system so new players are not matched against experienced players. Who knows, I might even code my soon to be published card game, that would be great fun to play online.
