User-created games to drive Xbox Live Arcade?

Xbox Live has become an important content delivery service. Movies are now available, with episodic and user-generated games set to make an impact in future

User-generated games and episodic content will play a large part in the future of Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service. That's according to XBLA exec, David Edery, who made the comments in a frank interview with GamesIndustry.biz.

Edery thinks that one of the biggest drives on the Xbox is towards user-generated content. "Multiple internal groups are trying to think about the best way of supporting it on the console and I can tell you for sure that things are happening, I just don't know if we'll see any of them in the next 12 months.

Cheaper prices

"We're also really excited about trying to bring episodic content to XBLA. We haven't really done it yet and we're trying to think of the best ways to do so.

Episodic content would see larger games split into small pieces and made available for cheaper prices. This model has already been tried out on the PC with the Sam & Max games. The comic characters were bought to life in a series of chapters which were later pieced together and sold as a whole game.

"It's an obvious statement but we don't want to put out bad content. We need to see a really, really good episodic franchise before we go ahead and throw a bunch of half an hour or hourly gameplay episodes on our service," Edery told the games website.

"We're making it clear that we're very open to this sort of thing."

James Rivington

James was part of the TechRadar editorial team for eight years up until 2015 and now works in a senior position for TR's parent company Future. An experienced Content Director with a demonstrated history of working in the media production industry. Skilled in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), E-commerce Optimization, Journalism, Digital Marketing, and Social Media. James can do it all.