Millions come to play in Xbox Arcade

Brian D. Crecente, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 4, 2006 at midnight

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The video game arcade may have seen its last days, but the Xbox Live Arcade is millions strong.

Built into Microsoft's new Xbox 360 console, the Live Arcade is a virtual video game store that lets console owners download low-frills games for free to try out or buy them for as little as $5 to $15 a pop.

"We always thought Arcade was going to be big, but arcade is blowing the doors off everyone's expectations," said Greg Canessa, group manager of Xbox Live Arcade.

It's just two months since the console's launch and the number of people who have downloaded games to buy or try is already in the millions. The number of people who have purchased the games is in the hundreds of thousands, he said.

Canessa declined to release specific numbers, but says Arcade is well along the way to creating a self-sustaining "ecosystem" for innovative downloadable indie games.

One of the keys to Arcade's success is its integration into the Xbox 360. To go shopping, gamers just select the Marketplace menu on their console and hop into the Arcade.

Once there you can browse the titles by genre. Playable demos can be downloaded for free and the full game can be purchased with Microsoft Points, which cost about a dollar for every 80 points.

Arcade's current game selection ranges from restyled arcade classics like the ostrich-festooned Joust and dungeon crawling Gauntlet to casual games like Hearts and pool to oddly addictive indie titles like Wik: Fable of Souls and Astropop.

By far the hottest among the 16 games is Bizarre Creations' Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. The brain-churning space shooter requires gamers to use one thumbstick to zip a simplistic C-shaped spaceship around a black screen perpetually filling with a menagerie of color-oozing spacecraft. Players use the other thumbstick to control which way they shoot, while avoiding the screenful of colorful creations and the bits of spray each lets off.

While each session of Geo Wars lasts about five minutes, Canessa says the combined playtime since the Xbox launch of all of the people blasting their way through the interactive kaleidoscope totals more than two decades. "The number of play years in Geo Wars is staggering," he said.

"This is our Halo," he added, referring to the original Xbox first-person shooter that was so popular it spurred sales for the console. "It's helped to validate Arcade."

And with that success has come a lot of attention. Canessa and his team of 15 have been bombarded by submissions from game developers, large and small, who want in on the Arcade phenomenon.

"Interest was high and growing before we launched, now it's pretty amazing," he said. "We are getting 12 to 15 game submissions a week and that doesn't include (large publishers like) Electronic Arts, Capcom, Midway or Konami."

Canessa says they're probably going to exceed the 35 titles Microsoft promised would be on Arcade by this Summer.

While developers can pitch their games directly to Canessa's team, several publishers also are acting as filters. Chief among those is indie developer Garage Games. The developer's Marble Blast Ultra hit the Arcade last week.

It took a team of six programmers about six months to create the game. By comparison, a typical mainstream console game can take dozens of people working a year to create. That, says Garage Game's Benjamin Bradley, is one of the big attractions.

"The whole idea of the Live Arcade, that's going to be the future," Bradley said. "If you think of the development cost of someone making Halo 3, that's in the millions."

"With Live Arcade you can make these smaller, graphically amazing games with core gameplay and a smaller price point and no distribution costs and you get it into millions of homes. That's the way to go."

Canessa came up with the idea for Arcade several years ago. It had a much less successful run on the original Xbox, which Canessa calls an experiment. He says the idea for Arcade came to him when he noticed all of the consolidation in the game industry and a drop in creativity.

"Games were getting more and more expensive to produce and publishers were consolidating," he said. "The market was becoming risk adverse, getting sequel-itis."

At the same time he saw that some smaller computer game makers were starting to play around with online distribution, cutting the retailer out of the picture and selling directly to gamers.

"But even that space was becoming a little homogenized," he said. "There was a very heavy emphasis on puzzle and word games. There was a huge gap and no way to reach those customers and make these really cool ideas for games succeed."

The answer to the skyrocketing cost of game development and publishers becoming increasingly less willing to take chances was Arcade, Canessa said.

"This is a true access point for indie development to get on the console."

Play time

The top 10 Xbox Live Arcade Games

• Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved

• Gauntlet

• Smash TV

• Bejeweled II

• Zuma

• Bankshot Billiards

• Outpost Kaloki

• Mutant Storm Reloaded