Xbox LIVE Community Games (XBLCG)

I can see the appeal in it; after all, it provides an easy means for people to produce games a damned sight quicker than they used to given that XNA covers a lot of the dirty work for you and provides you with a lot of bells and whistles, even though I don't really like XNA myself for varying reasons.

However, I'm not so keen on some of the games appearing on it. My 360 broke and I haven't had it repaired yet, but in my experience a lot of the games were obviously very amateur and basically total pony. There didn't seem to be much in the way of quality control and some of that stuff was absolutely abysmal. That's not to say there aren't any good games, it's just a gem hidden in a sea of turds.

Another deal breaker for me was to have to pay just to test my own code on my own 360. I'm well aware that you can test locally on PC with a USB adapter to hook up a 360 controller as I've done it myself, but I don't have to pay to test Windows Mobile Apps or iPhone apps so why this? I suppose that, in itself, is partly the quality control I'm looking for as only the serious developers will want to pay but even so it's a bit of a liberty considering I'm already paying £40 per year for Xbox LIVE (which, correct me if I'm wrong, you need to be a Gold member of to even use XNACC in the first place - or at least I thought you did).

So, in a nutshell; nice concept, flawed execution with a few creases needing ironed out, namely in quality control.

There is no quality control beyond the absolute minimal no crashing, no illegal content, no copyright infringements, etc. There is room to reject games based on confusion and bad controls, but this hardly ever stops anyone.

Quality control will be solved with ratings, not rejections. Everyone wants it, and as far as I know it's in the makings.

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Original post by ukdeveloper ...I don't have to pay to test Windows Mobile Apps or iPhone apps so why this?

I believe you *do* have to pay to test iPhone apps on the hardware itself. Only running through the emulator is free. I still haven't figured out how to test multi-touch stuff through the emulator.

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Original post by ukdeveloper Another deal breaker for me was to have to pay just to test my own code on my own 360. I'm well aware that you can test locally on PC with a USB adapter to hook up a 360 controller as I've done it myself, but I don't have to pay to test Windows Mobile Apps or iPhone apps so why this? I suppose that, in itself, is partly the quality control I'm looking for as only the serious developers will want to pay but even so it's a bit of a liberty considering I'm already paying £40 per year for Xbox LIVE (which, correct me if I'm wrong, you need to be a Gold member of to even use XNACC in the first place - or at least I thought you did).

Nope, you can use XNACC with a Silver membership.

And you can enter the Dream Build Play 2009 contest, and get a 12-month CC trial membership just for entering. The trial membership is sufficient for deploying to your own Xbox.

Since they've been holding the contest for a few years now, you can pretty much have a continuous trial membership until you're ready to take the plunge and release your work.

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Original post by capn_midnight Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper ...I don't have to pay to test Windows Mobile Apps or iPhone apps so why this? I believe you *do* have to pay to test iPhone apps on the hardware itself.

No, you can create an ad-hoc copy of the game and copy it over to your iPhone/iPod Touch for testing. This is what happened with latest iPhone game I worked on.

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Original post by ukdeveloper Another deal breaker for me was to have to pay just to test my own code on my own 360.

I agree with you there. It's backwards. You shoudl pay to list your finished game in the shop, not the other way around. I've posted as much on the XNA forums.

Prior to 3.0 There was nothing else to sell. Just being allowed to get your game running on the xbox at all (for fun), was what the 99$ was for. Things should change a bit now.

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Original post by Obscure Quote: Original post by capn_midnight Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper ...I don't have to pay to test Windows Mobile Apps or iPhone apps so why this? I believe you *do* have to pay to test iPhone apps on the hardware itself. No, you can create an ad-hoc copy of the game and copy it over to your iPhone/iPod Touch for testing. This is what happened with latest iPhone game I worked on.

Really? - without paying the $99 enrollment fee? Link please.

I've currently got a game selling on XBLCG. It's called NextWar: The Quest for Earth. (

">Trailer)

My opinion? Don't quit your day job. NextWar (much to my surprise) is selling relatively well compared to a lot of other Community Games. But even so, the money simply isn't there. The game has been on sale for 16 full days so far, and these are my stats to date:

Trial downloads: 11885
Sales: 1891
Conversion Rate: 15.91%
Total revenue (USD): $3203.35

The game is still selling at a healthy rate, but I'd be surprised if I sold over 3000 copies. ~2500 copies is a more realistic estimate as game sales tend to drop off a cliff after some time.

As you can see, it's not nearly enough to fund any sort of professional development. And remember, NextWar is one of the better selling games on the service - it was ranked #2 in XBLCG sales for the week of March 30th and so far has spent the majority of its life in the top 3 of the popularity charts. Word on the grapevine is that an average XBLA game makes ~$300,000 in lifetime revenue. I think XBLCG is fine for hobbyist development and to make a little money on the side, but like I said - don't quit your day job.

Sc4Freak, good job with NextWar: The Quest for Earth!

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Original post by Sc4Freak I've currently got a game selling on XBLCG. It's called NextWar: The Quest for Earth. ( ">Trailer)

Ooo, stylish! Nice!

saw this on the other site the other day. seems to imply some underhandedness going on somewhere.

I'm doing a game for XBLGC, Bennu, and releasing it soon.

As a player I had a browse around the community games and found them to be a complete waste of time. Most of them are so bad they're offensive - particularly the retarded "calibrate your tv" and "fireplace" non-games. Even worse is that people are attempting to charge for that shit.

It's odd that there's so many good freeware indie games on pc which are fun and of good quality, yet XBLCG seems to be almost entirely made up of 13-year-olds "OMG I MOVED A SPRITE LOLZ" games. I'm sure there's some good stuff in there somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it. [sad]

Obscure is correct you can get your apps onto the iPhone or iPod touch without paying the $99 fee so you can test your app and then pay the developers fee when you are ready to publish. Just go to the Apple SDK page sign up and download the free SDK.

As for XNA it is very easy to get a free subscription that will let you do everything except publish your game either by entering DreamBuildPlay, being enroled at a University that is an Academic Alliance member or attending some kind of Microsoft event where thay usually send you a free trial subscription just for attending.

As for the games appearing on the XBLCG the majority of them are absolute crap with one or two exceptions. I don't think the reason that the games appearing are bad is because the developers can't do better. I think it's simply because they were that excited about being able to get something on XBOX live that they've gone and published the first thing they were able to cobble together.

As time goes on we'll probably see some much better indie content appearing on there. Even the best comunity games at present lack the polish of the more pro Live Arcade games but that will change as more people start developing real games instead of "OMG I MOVED A SPRITE LOLZ" games.

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Original post by OrangyTang I'm sure there's some good stuff in there somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it. [sad]

Therein lies the problem. The best XNA (and XBLCG) coverage is XNA Roundup (I watch their YouTube channel). To quote them: "We find the best games on the xbox live community games tab and give you the rundown on what's worth playing each and every week." I have already seen commenters asking him to review bad games to show gamers what to avoid. That's not what we need. Bad games are 90+% of XBLCG. What we need is someone to show the way to the good games. I find the idea of showing the best games, best. (I love it so much, I am currently trying to get on the show with my game.)

I also forgot to add that a lot of the games I saw felt like prototypes and unfinished demos, let alone full games. Not one of the ones I played urged me to actually buy them. One of them was a little basic 3D flight sim which looked, played and felt like some garbage tutorial someone had found or a free sample one might find bundled with an engine download or some kind of basic tech demo that might have shipped with and old-school dev kit of some kind; it was hideous but it had a pricetag.

Also, the fireplace "game"? A total joke, it's basically a lame screensaver and I'm expected to pay for that? My question is, would something like that pass cert for regular XBLA? I mean it's not even a game, it should never have passed peer review and should never have been put out there for people to actually buy.

I have this thing about console development in general, though. Any muppet can write a game for PC and sell it. For a console, you have to be approved, pay loads of £££, sign an epic NDA, get dev/test/debug kits, go through cert/QA and then, maybe then, your game might actually sell well and turn a minimal profit. Of course, I forgot to mention that you're at the mercy of the console manufacturer as well as your publisher if your publisher is third-party.

I know Microsoft mean well with XNA, but I find the current execution to be flawed. It should be like the iTunes app store; test your own code locally for free, but pay to upload it and have it listed, I could live with that. But having to pay just to test my own code, on my own console that I've already paid for? Take a fucking hike. That is nickle-and-diming, not even Apple are that bad.

Also, I've seen a lot of people whining about not having full XLAST capability built into XNA. Well, yeah, I can see why; both for people whining and both for MS not giving it out.

I think a lot of us have missed the point with XBLCG, which is freedom. No rules. No restrictions. Let everything on there. Then, all you need is a system to showcase the best of XBLCG.

As soon as you put in a rule to remove fireplace, you remove something else. As soon as you remove non-games, you may remove sandbox games that are not games at all, and have nothing to accomplish, that may be popular.

Restricting what gets on there is not the answer. Where would the line be drawn? Plus, they already have a system like that, which is XBLA. Cave shooters were rejected by XBLA, so you can imagine how hard it would be for us to get accepted onto XBLA when the cutoff line is already drawn "above" our game.

EDIT: And I appreciate that the first reaction is to have restrictions on XBLCG that are just not as harsh as XBLA, but whatever criteria we use to reject those games can maybe be put in place to rate the games. I am so curious how the XNA team is going to implement ratings, and if it will be the community or the gamers (or both) that will do the ratings.

A non-rejection system work on the open world of the PC, where the best games rise to the top, so I think that's how we have to think about XBLCG.

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Original post by Matthew Doucette As soon as you put in a rule to remove fireplace, you remove something else. As soon as you remove non-games, you may remove sandbox games that are not games at all, and have nothing to accomplish, that may be popular.

XBox Live Community Games.

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Original post by phantom Quote: Original post by Matthew Doucette As soon as you put in a rule to remove fireplace, you remove something else. As soon as you remove non-games, you may remove sandbox games that are not games at all, and have nothing to accomplish, that may be popular. XBox Live Community Games.

Trust me, I've pushed that point and others as well. But the fact is that nobody wants to let a community of people define 'game', especially when most can barely handle peer reviewing as is. For example, it's fairly easy to say that the Calculator360 is an app, but what about Drumkit? Near as I can tell it is interactive and fun, but with no direct goals. However there are some experimental games that are quite similar.

Things would be greatly different if Microsoft went the Apple route of employing reviewers and testers. The quality bar would be higher and they would likely have blocked some of the games from reaching the service. However they want a community led initiative and you just can't trust the community to be on the same page with defining 'game'.

So they've constantly held that the only things a game can be rejected for are technical failures and prohibited content. By all matters of review, you could make a brand new XNA Game Studio project, display text that says "Press Back to Quit", loop over all controllers checking for back (and quitting as appropriate), and that would pass peer review and make it to the service.