Hypership out of Control Dev claims XBLIG has been buried by the new dashboard
Developer Kris Steele has posted a graph on his blog which he claims proves the Xbox Live Indie Games platform isn't growing.
After the Xbox Live dashboard was redesigned, XBLIG was moved, and this has prompted some to claim the marketplace has been "burried".
The graph shows first day and first week trials for several of Kris's games, which shows that his latest game, "Hypership Still out of Control" saw a marked decrease in the number of first day and first week trials.
Though Kris acknowledges there may be mitigating factors, he points out that after each tweak to the dashboard, his games have had fewer trials despite their having sold more actual copies.
He concludes:
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"Ultimately I do not believe the XBLIG market is not growing. I believe these numbers show that. I believe the biggest factor is Microsoft's burying of XBLIG. Even with Volchaos-like trials, I was not making enough sales to run a profitable game studio. Certainly with Hypership Still Out of Control trial downloads, I have no chance. And that's why I've moved on."
...and the difficult in finding, browsing, searching, and sorting in generally is not just related to Indie Games. Browsing of on-HDD games and media is also still mind-numbingly slow; Checksums are fast and easy to calculate and compare, but my 360 still crawls like an ancient PoS PC whenever it has to read and display content which is already on my HDD.
