By John Porcaro on Xbox
John Hattan, in an interview last month on gamedev.net, talked to Microsoft's Chris Early and Shawn McMichael about Casual Gaming. He asked what it would take to get Microsoft to look at including a game in Xbox Live Arcade.
"There are two ways, and it somewhat depends on the platform. In most of our platforms, we have developer license folks or portfolio planners, and that's what their job is. They take submissions and look over content and give feedback and plan what the portfolio is going to be with the folks who run the services. ...
I guess the follow-up question would be "what would be something that would be interesting to us?" Partly it depends on the platform. If it's something that's going to go on the Xbox 360, it depends on that demographic and the question of whether that content would fit there. And part of that also depends on what we already have. We don't want ten pool games. There might be a couple of pool games because there are game-variations, but we want games that will fill holes in the portfolio.
As for what games do appear, games that run on multiple platforms are much more interesting. Developers who are willing to take our API's and build in the score reporting features and the leader-board system and the achievement system are much more interesting. If you take advantage of the community features, that makes a game much more interesting from the standpoint of us, the host.
But I have to say, the core of all of it is "is the game fun?" Is the game approachable and does the game meet those elements of what a casual game is. I believe that's the agreement that we have with our players. We're going to put games out that are fun. That's our commitment. It does me no good to put out 500 games if 450 of them are bad."
Chris is a busy guy. In a related story published last week, BusinessWeek asks more questions about
mobile gaming.
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