Microsoft takes up to 60% of Community Games revenue

Ouch but its hardly suprising

I guess that .16 cent charge per gig isnt that bad after all…

wasn’t aware that Sony offer free games development software and also a service which allows any one from the general public to pick up the coding bug and release games on their service at a cost of buying a yearly membership.

The fact Microsoft are taking the biggest piece of the pie is not surprising. I’ve seen other company’s do simaler practices.

Just been reading about this over at the XNA community games site. Apparently they no longer take an extra cut for the advertising / promotion, leaving it at 70/30 (Dev / MS).

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/news/downloadhistorynews
http://forums.xna.com/forums/p/28043/156237.aspx#156237

Why they didn’t do this from the beginning is beyond me.

Nathan Fout apparently gave up his position at Insomniac Games to develop for XNA.

That retraction on the additional 10-30% for XNA game promotion on Live has the caveat of “for the forseeable future” attached to it.

Yeah, I was reading about that over at NeoGAF. Seems that if you’ve got a product people might want right now it’s better to throw it up on the iphone store. That or push to try and get it on XBLA / PSN.

MS needs to do a shitload to improve community games, starting with ratings so that people can find the gems amongst the endless piles of junk.

The 60% is only for games that they ‘feature’. Your average Joe actually gets the usual 70:30 deal in their favour. I guess all the Dream Build Play winners got lumped in the same boat as they’ve a special section on the dashboard.

Having just read an update to that blog though I think Microsoft decided to waive it for the first four months, so might be worth checking.

Fair enough. MS spent the time and money developing the software, not to mention the platform and XBL.

They definitely need some filtering and some quality control. 95% of the stuff on there is complete crap. Just because it works doesn’t necessarily mean it should go up there. Even if everything does ultimately go up, there really needs to be some kind of review system in place that allows the good stuff to filter to the top.

Those figures seem sort of mean, though. Although my impression of community games was that it was for amateurs working on stuff in their spare time, not a way for developers to give up their day job and make a living.

Isn’t the community rating it? User controlled, user created. For the users by the users.

As long as you live in one of the chosen markets.

I would love to see what’s going on but having picked “socialist haven” instead of “capitalist compund” at birth all I get is reports on “the GAF”

;_;

Damn you Göran!

a 5 star rating system would easily work in regards to filtering. Users on xbox live simply apply a rating to the games they have tried. I certainly do not believe the most popular games have been some code to make your pad vibrate lol. The game could get a base rating from testers before submitted to xbox live.

5 star always works well enough to control the quality of user generated content to a degree were you can find the best content faster. Just include a filter option in the all community games section for 5 star, 4 star, 3 star and so on.