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New Xbox Live Game Every Week 61

Posted by Zonk from the it's-like-candy dept.
Eurogamer reports that, with Xbox Live Wednesdays already a hit, Microsoft intends to continue releasing a new XBLA title every week for the near future. The company has announced their intention to have 160 titles for their next-gen console available by the end of the year, and some 30 of those may be Xbox Live Arcade titles. From the article: "The idea is to allow Xbox 360 owners who do not own hard disks to store downloaded Live Arcade games on memory units, which allow for 64MB of data. However, with PlayStation 3 in particular likely to allow for much larger downloadable games, Microsoft runs the risk of losing out on bigger releases despite the impressive momentum Live Arcade has already built up. Erickson admits that the company is already considering the possibilities of larger memory units, but there's no word on hard-disk-only Live Arcade games or other digitally distributed titles - although it's important to note that the latter, which Microsoft is certainly considering, would fall outside his remit."
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New Xbox Live Game Every Week More

New Xbox Live Game Every Week

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  • Xbox Live almost too good (Score:4, Interesting)

    by the computer guy nex ( 916959 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @02:25PM (#15785882)
    Very good way to spend your money is to spend the $60 saved up for a new 360 game and buy a whole slew of XBL games. They are a great compliment to the major 360 titles.

    360 games are selling like crazy in the US. Few weeks ago 7 of the top 10 games sold in America were 360 games (PS2 had the #10 spot with Kingdom Hearts, New Super Mario Bros #1, DDR for Gamecube somewhere in the middle).

    360 also has the highest games sold/console ratio of any major console. Have to chuckle at the people who say the system has a limited library.
    • I've gotta agree. I don't even have a 360, and I've already heard tons of good things about XBOX Live Arcade. With the promise of a new game a week, it's definitely something to look into.
    • Well thats because theres Xbox 360 new games right now and really no new games that are worth much on the other systems outside of the DS. Everyone is working on 360, Wii, PS3, DS and to some extent PSP games. It's fairly eaisy to sell allot of games when theres no current gen competition.
    • 360 games are selling like crazy in the US. Few weeks ago 7 of the top 10 games sold in America were 360 games (PS2 had the #10 spot with Kingdom Hearts, New Super Mario Bros #1, DDR for Gamecube somewhere in the middle).

      It's impossible to accurately track video game sales in the US. Where did you get these numbers from? If they're from the NPD Group (which is likely), they are not representative of all sales. NPD does not get sales reports from all retailers (including a little place called Wal-Mart).

      36
  • The only NEWS here is that the 360 is considering bigger memory cards. We've known about the whole "new-game-a-week" thing for a while, now; there was a story about that two weeks ago on here.
  • Last I heard (though I'll probably be proven wrong in the replies below), the free version of Xbox Live was almost useless... So my question is this: is there really that many people paying yet another monthly fee on top of their internet connection? How about numbers for countries other than the USA? I mean, I don't know anyone who actually has an Xbox 360, everyone simply rents them.
    • Downloadable games, IIRC, do not require an XBOX gold membership... just requires XBOX Live marketplace credit (and a place to store the downloaded game, of course).

    • Re:Another monthly fee? (Score:5, Informative)

      by aesiamun ( 862627 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @02:41PM (#15786000) Homepage Journal
      Other than the lack of playing games online, you have access to the XBL Arcade which has a bunch of games that you can buy and play. Some of these are classics (frogger, galaga, uno, etc) others are more independent (cloning clyde, outpost keoki X)...Also, you get the XBox live marketplace which has videos, music, demos, trailers, themes, background images, avatar images, etc.

      So unless you like playing against others online, you can get by with just the free silver account.

      The gold account is cheap anyway, less than $8 a month or less than $5 a month if you pay for the whole year. I used to pay more than that per day when I smoked cigarettes.
    • Xbox Live Silver is only useless if you want to play online. That's it. And I've already heard of one free play weekend (might be mistaking it for claims of future free play weekends from pre-launch statements... but I'm pretty sure about this), but Xbox Live is more than that now. You don't have to play to have friends lists and message and things like that, just about everything you can do online without a game in the disc tray is available for free (on that note, I don't know how it applies to XBLA onlin

    • Re:Another monthly fee? (Score:4, Informative)

      by CaymanIslandCarpedie ( 868408 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @02:44PM (#15786035) Journal
      The only thing the free version cannot do is play on-line games against others. Live arcade, along with evertyhing else is available with the free version.
    • Actually the free version of XBL serves its purpose. . . You cannot play games online, but the market place is still wide open to you.
      As far as I'm concerned, the market place is much more valuable than people would have you believe.
      I have yet to buy an X360 game, but I've probably spent about twice the value of a new game just on XBLA games, map packs and car packs for games that friends/family own.
      Currently I have the pay-for package, but I hardly spend any time playing online what with all the lamers,
      • I play lots of multiplayer, I've hardly come across any "kiddies", almost everyone I've played with is twenty-something. I think it helps to pick the right zone, recreation is not full of kids.

        As other people say reputation helps people are less likely to be a dick due to the lack of anonymity. It seems.
  • but I must admit that MS has done a lot better job with Xbox360 than they did with the first Xbox. Everyone that has a 360 raves about Live and the Arcade and downloading demos. By the time PS3 comes out, the 360 will have a solid library of full titles and a ton of the arcade games. Developers will have had the system in their hands for a while and will be able to utilize the system better.

    If MS can deliver a solid price drop (maybe $250 to $300 for the premium system, dropping the core model) by the time
    • If MS can deliver a solid price drop (maybe $250 to $300 for the premium system, dropping the core model) by the time wii and PS3 arrive

      No such thing though.

      According to Bloomberg, Microsoft have stated that they will be not adjusting the 360's price in light of the launch of the PS3. An MS rep commented there is currently no schedule in place to cut prices.

      http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=8710 [maxconsole.net]

      • Of course they said that. They'd be stupid not to say that.

        And it's probably true - there currently are no plans for cutting the price, considering that the launch date of the PS3 isn't quite set in stone yet. Once Sony has a specific date for the PS3 launch, MS will likely start plans to cut the XBox360 price just after the PS3 launch.

        The reason why Microsoft is saying that they have no plans is because if they did admit that they plan on dropping the price, they'd lose sales at the higher price. Th

  • Three simple alternatives (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @02:38PM (#15785980) Journal
    1) After-market harddrives. Pretty cheap from 3rd parties.

    2) There is currently a device that slides between an Xbox HD and the Xbox that allows you to use storage on your PC. Why not a device that lets you share your PC's HD to begin with from a 3rd party as well.

    All XBs actaully will stream music from your XP PC's HD (and XP Media Center will stream video). Maybe just let you use storage space on your PC directly with a simple software update from MS.

    • Where do you get these aftermarket Hard drives? I have yet to see them...and what is this about something between the hard drive and the console?
      • I spotted an ad but can't recall it.

        This is a good starting point: Looky here [hackaday.com]

        • that allows you to take your xbox drive and attach it to a computer, but not vice versa. At this point it's pretty much going to be the 20GB drive you get or none at all. That site also mentions a 20GB hard coded limit which will have to change once and if MS releases HD upgrades off the shelf. I think i'll just wait till they release a 100 or 200GB model.
        • Right now, it's not possible to use aftermarket hard drives.

          There's a special hash put on the drives that tells the Xbox360 whether's an xbox360 drive or not.

          You can image the hard drive (it's just a standard SATA disk), but you cannot restore it over another hard drive, or a different Xbox360 hard drive. In fact, if you do the latter without imaging it, you'll lose the ability to use that hard drive in an Xbox360.

          And there are tools to rip out stuff from the hard drive and onto your PC. Check out Xplorer36 [360gamesaves.com]
    • I'm pretty sure that currently, the Xbox 360 only lets you store content like game saves, downloaded trailers, XBLA titles, etc. on either the official 360 hard-drive or a 64MB memory card. The easy solution is to sell the 20GB laptop drive that is the Xbox 360 drive at a fair price: $40 or $50. Then make the $100 hard-drive 80GB.
    • I'm sure they are planning a remote storage device thing BUT:

      a) They want to make money off perephrials first

      b) They probably want to ship it with Vista where they probably trust the DRM a bit more. With remote storage of save games its just that much easier to soft-mod your box.
  • One thing I don't get is why Microsoft again went with custom memory cards, SD-Cards are extremly cheap these days (1gb for 20EUR) while those 'memory units' are still horribly expensive (64mb for 30EUR), even Sonys memory sticks are cheap in comparism (1gb for 50EUR). Ok, Microsoft can make some money with those memory units, but given that XBox360 is all about Live and multimedia and stuff, wouldn't it have made more sense to actually add support for media that is both more widespread and compatible (inse
    • I'm sure they didn't want to use any memory device that could connect to a pc. there would be all kinds of cracks and whatnot available from the savegame files like for the psp
      • SD-Cards actually do have build in DRM stuff which might be used to make haking impossible or at least a lot harder, however I have no idea how that actually works and never seen it in action.
    • You answered your own question. Microsoft can make money selling memory cards. Selling accessories is one of the ways to make up for selling consoles at a loss.

  • Bigger games != Better games? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @03:15PM (#15786239)
    However, with PlayStation 3 in particular likely to allow for much larger downloadable games, Microsoft runs the risk of losing out on bigger releases despite the impressive momentum Live Arcade has already built up.

    I thought one of the biggest factors towards the Xbox Live success has been the fact that developers could quickly and easily make a low budget game, throw it up on Xbox Live for cheap and see where the market takes it. With larger budget, larger sized and larger 'content' (read: prettier graphics) in game demos, what makes them stand out from PC demos? (Which have arguably become oversized given their short length.)

    • I think in this case, the question is 'big' relative to the 64MB card in an Xbox360.

      If the games are 30MB each (pulling sizes out of my hat), then after getting one or two, I'd need another card. Good for people who have the money to spend on them, but for those who don't, or don't want to, it might make people not buy as much.

      If I have a release in this size range, I might be put off on the Xbox Live, since my prospective audience might not have enough 'free space' to get the game/demo. That might be an
      • Then get the hard drive. Easy fix.
      • Xbox Live Arcade is more or less focused on 'casual' gaming, that is more or less 2D games. With that in mind, if your game is 32MB or larger (half of a memory card), then chances are you're aiming at the wrong market. Don't forget, SNES and Genesis games often times ranged between 32MB to 64MB on average, and we all saw how much 'content' developers managed to squeeze into games. Throw in modern compression programs and its VERY easy to squeeze some Xbox Live Arcade games into a few MBs. Heck, they recentl
        • Heck, they recently released Street Fighter 2 (I forget which version) on Xbox Live Arcade and the original SNES rom was roughly 3 MBs.


          Out of curiousity, any idea how big the XBox Live version is? (just wondering)

  • 64 Megs... Why? Has that always been that way? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gmrc.2 ( 674908 ) <`gmrc416' `at' `hotmail.com'> on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @05:47PM (#15787085)
    I can understand the desire to allow folks the ability to transport their Arcade game(s) on a memory unit .... but *force* developers to adhere to that? Why?

    I mean, is it a "consistent user experience" thing? Personally, no one I know that has a 360 transports their Arcade games, except by HDD, and would rather have larger, richer Arcade games instead.

    64 meg games will be a HUGE disadvantage eventually .... *especially* if no one is transporting their games via memory card.

    Just let developers make the Arcade games they want, and let the buying public decide how big is too big.
    • Because there's no built in harddrive, so the "lowest common denominator" in this case is storing stuff on the cheap memory card. If they get rid of the limit, I'd say the number of games devs would work to keep under the 64 MB limit would be pretty small, and anyone without a HD would be locked out. I'm not sure where extra content falls under. A lot of games are small and have lots of extra levels to buy and add on (~$0.50 to $1.00 seems like)

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