QUOTE(Math1 @ May 24 2006, 05:44 PM)
BasicAir -
Where did you get the idea that MS charges developers to do games for Arcade? They don't charge devs to do games, they PAY devs to do games. But they are very choosy about what games they will allow on the system.
I have a buddy doing a game for Arcade and he told me that they do things in different ways, but basically its like any publisher. For games that MS publishes (Uno, Geo Wars, etc...) they pay for the development. If it is from another publisher (like Popcap, for example) that publisher pays for the development.
But MS doesn't charge to put content on the service.
Of course the games aren't free -- they cost money to develop, whether MS is paying or the developer is paying. You need to pay for office space, computers, net access, tools, dev kits, salaries, etc... These games are a LOT cheaper to make than something like Oblivion, but they still get made by people who have bills to pay and noone works as hard as it takes to make a good game for free.
As to not being able to re-sell Arcade titles, why should you be able to? You can't re-sell downloaded music from iTunes, or any downloaded games on the Web. Every single Arcade title has a free trial mode so you don't ever have to buy anything without trying it first. If you try it and don't like it, don't buy.
ROFL. As I said in my post, an OXM article from about 3-6 months ago was talking about how for $10,000 you can make your own Live Arcade game. My figure may be wrong as it strictly from memory, but it said any person in the world can make a game for Live Arcade -- All they have to do is pay MS the money for the toolset and what goes along with the process (MS hosting it on their servers, their bandwidth / MS handing the transactions of credit cards / MS certifying the game / Etc.). This is all according to the article, not me.
Basically it was saying to me, the reader, and/or you, the reader that if you want to make a Live Arcade game, you can. Not only that, MS encourages it. However, you do have to come up with a small amount of dough (again I think it was $10,000) to give to the big M$. This doesn't even guarantee that your game will make it on Arcade - this just means they will provide you with the necessary tools, again, according to the article. It's *you* who has to make the game, a good game at that, too, and a secure one -- MS will not certify your Live Arcade title if it's incredibly lame in their eyes (unlike Sony -- the PS1 had over 2,000 titles -- 80% of which weren't even worth looking at for most anyone).
The article talks about how MS encourages this not only so that they can make more money by offering more games in the Live Arcade, but because of one main factor: The high development costs of making a game these days are insane -- millions of dollars, and yet 9 out of every 10 console games released fail to make a profit once everything is said and done -- licenses are paid to the console manufacturer, legal fees, employee wages, marketing, manufacturing, etc). The article discussed how back in the Atari and NES days, if you had a PC and an imagination, you could single-handedly make your own game and MS wants to make this an affordable thing to do again!
So there's your answer.
Sure, YOU get paid if you make a game for Live Arcade and it gets put up -- but you won't get 100% of the profits.
****** On a side note I want to say I don't know why big companies like EA aren't taking better advantage of the new capabilities of live. Madden 2006, for example -- all of the achievment points could be gained within hours. Also, why not come out with a ton more Themes and GamerPictures to sell - No, I'm not saying we need more for every sports team, but EA could easilly do this for any IP (Intellectual Property) they have, such as Medal of Honor. With the new Airborne game coming out for that series, they should already be offering themes and gamerpictures for it - they could make more money I'd imagine by doing it sooner rather than later - especially if a game that has a lot of hype ends up being a boring, dull game. I also hope they REALLY start to take advantage of the Achievments. The best company to take advantage of the Marketplace and Achievments, to this date, imo, is the dev. team behind PGR3 (bizaar or whatever it is, I forget).
