[GameSpot] - Xbox Series X Should Offer A Service Like Xbox Live Arcade

[343iBot]

Xbox Series X is scheduled to be released in Holiday 2020, and when it does, Microsoft should offer a service similar to the once prominent Xbox Live Arcade. Combined with the welcome practices and services that Microsoft has made since the release of Xbox One, something like Xbox Live Arcade could be a beneficial way of both promoting and curating the indie game library on Xbox Series X.

Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) launched with Xbox 360 back in November 2005. The service promoted and hosted games that weren't a part of the rest of the Xbox Live Marketplace. Each game on XBLA was priced under $20 USD and had free trials, creating a library of games with a much lower bar for entry. You could try them out prior to deciding whether to buy them and they were much cheaper than the traditional $60 USD retail price of a AAA game. Right from the start, XBLA was used to promote games created by small teams and indie studios that were released for Xbox 360--a market that had traditionally only excelled on PC, not consoles.

I discovered plenty of cool-looking indie games and experimental titles through XBLA, like Mark of the Ninja, Minecraft (yes, really--I actually hadn't tried it prior to its release on Xbox 360), and Telltale's The Walking Dead. These games also released on other systems, but XBLA helped them gain traction on Xbox 360, the service prominently featured at least one new game every Wednesday. XBLA Wednesdays became this huge event (which, admittedly, began to peter out near the end of the Xbox 360's lifecycle), where new games were spotlighted and celebrated by the Xbox brand. If you were a small studio or solo creator and you could get your game to launch on Xbox 360, you were likely guaranteed to have your game promoted for a whole week.

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