I'm actually pretty excited about the XBOX Live market place for games. I'm working on a silly project which should be fun and hoping that if it turns out to be good fun, I could make $20 off of it. Even if a few people download it and enjoy it, I'd be happy.

I just started working with XNA and C# a week ago and I really love the framework. A lot of the boiler plate engine code has already been taken care of for me -- which was a bit of a stumbling block with DirectX and C++. Not only can I focus on developing creative and fun games, I can stop worrying about the business model for distribution and revenue... It's taken care of by Microsoft :)

Anyways, I'm super excited by all this :D. I LOVE seeing my creative ideas being brought to life.

Note: The game dev class I'm taking happens to be sponsored by a grant from Microsoft.

Quote: Original post by cyansoft
The bottom line, MS needs to:
Give players more time to demo a game

I've yet to see a game that I can't get a decent idea of how good it is in the time they allow currently.

Quote: Original post by cyansoft
Allow paying customers to write a review ala amazon.com, giving it a 1 to 5 star rating
The Marketplace site should allow sorting/filtering on the average customer rating
Each game's page should not only have the average rating displayed near the price, but also list all the customer's reviews

Ratings system is already on their plate of things to do, it just takes time.

Quote: Original post by cyansoft
There should be more than 3 price tiers, perhaps even a free price tier for the "hello world, I really do nothing" apps that us techies like to show off when we get our first thing to compile on a 360

Great, so there would be more crap to clog up the service. No thanks!