Mach X Games Blog

So XBLIG isn’t dead after all it seems. MS rolled out a couple of changes yesterday to the submission policy that has some people cheering and some people wondering why they even bothered (raises hand).

I can’t figure out who is running things there these days. This has to be one of the biggest wastes of time I’ve seen in a while for XBLIG. Maybe I’m missing the point, but letting developers upload bigger games and giving them more slots when the system is so broken as to be virtually useless seems absurd. The main list that users browse through to find games locks up every other week it seems, which makes submitting a game frustrating since you never know if your game will even be viewable when it passes peer review. That’s assuming people even find XBLIG in the first place with the insane tile used to access it and other games.

These changes feel like MS is throwing XBLIG devs a PR bone to get them to feel good about the service. It’s not even a meaty bone through; it’s dried up and weeks old. I get that doing this doesn’t really require any significant changes to XNA GS or the App Hub, but good grief, why not fix the existing bugs first before changing things?!?

I guess with the increase in submission size we can now expect massagers and zombie rip-off clones packed full of more useless crap. Like I need an app that vibrates the controller while listening to a couple hundred MBs of soundtracks or hi-res textures pasted on top of a crappy games.

I’ve just about given up on XBLIG. Unless MS does something significant to make the service attractive to devs and stop them from jumping ship to Steam and non-WP7 mobile platforms I can’t see it lasting much longer.