I’m waiting for my PS3 to get updated, so I have some time to kill.

I didn’t really give it a good think until the N+ devs brought it up, but has the Xbox Live Arcade has been riding the Suckage Express into Craptown in recent time?

I used to be a huge advocate of the service, having bought probably close to ten games in the first year. But I haven’t purchased an XBLA game since Carcassone despite having downloaded nearly every demo. Recently, I stopped caring enough to even spend the thirty seconds paying attention to what comes out every week, which I suppose is very bad for their service. I doubt everything that has come out has been bad, but has anything even been inspiring enough to warrant downloading? There isn’t too much that is radically new. In fact, most of the quality titles are remakes of old console games or conversions of board games.

For your reference, I’ve listed below the releases on XBLA over the past year. If I say something snarky about your game, don’t take it personally. I don’t have the time to be diplomatic about every game listed. As someone who has made a very… *ahem* poorly received/executed game himself, I know how there can be extenuating circumstances that conspire against you and your team. Don’t take it personally. Keep coming up with ideas.

So we have a lot of shmups, a lot of arcade ports and a lot of sequels to games we’ve already played. If we are looking for new designs and experiences that we either haven’t played at retail or haven’t already played on XBLA or the web, we have a very narrow market. And if we are looking for these original ideas that were also executed well, then we get even less from which to choose.

Now, Metacritic scores in handy chart form:

Now compare that to the Metacritic stats for all X360 games:

You see that insofar as Metacritic can be used as a barometer for quality, there is an obvious lack of top-tier games getting through the XBLA channels compared to quality titles getting through retail channels. The issue here is that XBLA was supposed to be a shepherd of good titles; that the ideas that retail missed because of its reliance on publishers who are risk-averse and ideas that could be hatched on a shoestring budget could find life on that service. What we have is retail mark two, which is exactly what the N+ devs were saying. It’s nice to back that up with data.

When I see devs kibitzing, I usually just take it as a singular event - that people are venting after a long cycle. I certainly do it. But this vent is different. It is absolutely spot on as commentary. We aren’t getting a Castle Crashers every week. We aren’t getting a Braid every week. In actuality, we are getting top-tier games on a less frequent per release basis than we do in the old-fashioned retail channel.

I of all people know you can’t just cater to the hardcore folks and only come out with titles that satisfy our nerd gamer fetishes, but the service should at least be able to come out with more daring items on a per release basis that the press-discs-and-ship-them-around-the-world model. That way is so twentieth century.