IF THESE GAMES ARE READY, WHY AREN’T THEY ON LIVE?

Gamerscore Blog, Microsoft’s in-house employee blog posted a story about their upcoming “Summer of Xbox Live Arcade” party in San Francisco. According to the article, in addition to the festivities, playable versions of several unreleased Xbox Live Arcade titles such as Frogger and Pac-Man will be available to attendees during the event.

Far from me to complain, but if these games are done, shouldn’t they be up in the Live Marketplace? It seems to me that Microsoft is missing a crucial slow summer period in which a good stream of Live Arcade titles could make up for the lack of retail releases. Further, rather than concentrating on the parties and such, how about an update to the Wireless Weekend or MU Monday contest winners list?

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the games are going to drop onto Live, because if they don’t it’s probably a good sign that Microsoft really has no clue what the hell they’re doing with the Live Arcade.

Check out the Gamerscore Blog story here and ask yourself what kind of a “Summer of Xbox Live Arcade” it’ll be if Microsoft doesn’t get off their asses and get some fresh content up.

JUST WHERE ARE ALL THOSE LIVE ARCADE GAMES ANYWAY?

I’m sure we’ve all noticed that there’s been a distinct lack of new Xbox Live Arcade games since launch. Sure we’ve gotten a few new independent games, but what happened to all those classic arcade games we were told were coming? Next Generation took the time to ask Microsoft’s Peter Moore just that question during a recent interview. Here’s what Peter had to say;

“Here’s what happened – people didn’t believe that Arcade was going to fly. So we went round a year and a half ago as we were doing the final plans for launching 360, and told our publishing friends that here’s what we think is really cool idea, where you could make games for hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of tens of millions, and at very low risk, but people didn’t believe it. And we released it and it blew the doors down. Now all of a sudden we’re in this phase where Sega, Namco, Konami, Midway… they want some of that. But we do have an important quality bar in place – we could probably throw 300 games up there quickly, and we are trying to get the independent guys going as well. It’s almost going to be like Pop Idol, where someone will pop out suddenly – Geometry Wars is a great example. But I love this forum, whether it’s profitable or not, this platform for indie developers, for four or five guys to put $100,000 into it, and we’ll publish it and see what happens.” -Peter Moore

While I’m sure the intitial hesitation was due to the relatively lackluster showing of the Live Arcade on the original Xbox, and I’m certainly glad that Microsoft is making sure everything that comes to Live Arcade is high quality, I still can’t help but wonder what the delay really is. You would think right now would be the perfect time of year to hit the Live Arcade with a bunch of new releases, as we’re entering that slow summer period and people are clamoring for just about any title they can get their hands on. No matter how you look at it, people want to see more games on XBLA, and I’m not talking about those overpriced, free on the PC game translations.

While I’m griping, can someone please call Capcom for me and ask them to kindly release Black Tiger for the Live Arcade? The lack of love that title gets from them is astounding. Anyway, check out the Next Generation article here and ask yourself if any day now Moore is going to tell us that no one cares about the Live Arcade too?