XBLA Head Admits That Prices Have Risen

XBLA portfolio director Chris Charla recently admitted to GamesIndustry.biz that the cost of purchasing an Xbox Live Arcade game has steadily crept up over the last couple of years, but added that the level of quality has kept pace with the rising prices.

"If you look at Live Arcade, and do the math, and look at the publicly available sales numbers, you can see that average prices on XBLA have crept up over the last few years, which has been an interesting trend because on some app markets there's been a race to zero as fast as possible," he said. "We've seen a little bit of the opposite happening. I don't really know where prices are going to go - ultimately, that's set by the market - but it has been really gratifying to see that people are willing to pay a premium price for digital content. "

As Eurogamer points out in its report, 2009 saw 21 out of 86 games released sell for 1200 Microsoft Points. That number rose to 27 out of 85 in 2010. This year 20 games have already been confirmed for a 1200 points release in 2011, with plenty more due out before the end of the year. The platform is maturing and the kinds of game experiences now possible are only limited by Microsoft's limitations on game download sizes.

Charla goes on to express his astonishment at some developers and publishers that compare digital platforms with traditional boxed retail games:

"Sometimes, when [developers] talk about Live Arcade they're like, 'We want to do a boxed quality game on Live Arcade', and I'm like, 'What does that mean?' I can point at a bunch of 38 and 42 and 56 metacritic scoring boxed games, so it actually kind of pisses me off."

"I think the games that we're shipping - a Limbo or a Castle Crashers - are as good as anything on the market."

In a market where free games on Facebook, 99 cent games on iOS and Android devices, and free-to-play online games are eating everyone's lunch, it is interesting to see a trend where one platform is seeing an increase in revenues, popularity, and ever-increasing quality. It is hard to say otherwise when you have such games as Trenched and Bastion on your system.

Source: Eurogamer