Saw a link on Gamasutra this morning to Microsoft's new rewards portal: http://www.xbox.com/en-us/live/rewards/orange. I thought I'd throw it out there that this could be VERY good for the Indie Games channel. Though there are millions of Gold subscribers, I'd wager that some of them have never funded their accounts with MS points (simply wanting Netflix, online play, etc...). Giving them a small number of points for things they do anyway is going to get them to explore around for where they can spend them... and that will hopefully mean us.

Nice! This is a great idea for getting more gamers used to MS points and downloadable content. Hopefully we eventually see some increased traffic from this.

Kinda odd that lots of bonuses are 200msp, but they've taken away the 200msp option for us.

I don't know.  Looking at the rules for the rewards program, here's what it says:

"PURCHASE CAN INCLUDE ANY SELECTION OF PAID CONTENT INCLUDING MOVIES, TV SHOWS, GAME ADD-ONS, ARCADE GAMES, GAMES ON DEMAND TITLES, THEMES, AND AVATARS." 

It seems to me that indie games and gamer pictures are excluded from that.  After all, they did go out of their way to specifically mention everything except for those two categories.

How could they tell what you spend your points on? Are they going to treat those x number of bonus points separately?

If they just deposit points into your account, I don't see how they could limit what you spend them on.

200MSP is good for 2x80 point games, some underwear for your avatar ;-) or a couple of music tracks on your Zune.

Its not going to get you much in the way of videos or XBLA games... so I think this will be great for Indies.

Of course its a small pilot program as far as I can make out so who knows how much effect its going to have on anything.

The ZMan:

so I think this will be great for Indies.

I agree, but at the same time, people shouldn't expect their sales to just boost significantly....

I think this will potentially be great for indies. Especially if people get these points at a time where they have nothing in their account. If I got given a free 80 MS points and that's all I had, I would feel compelled to spend it on something.
It may not revolutionise sales numbers, but an extra 5-10 sales is better than no sales right ? :) It can only be a good thing.

UberGeekGames:

How could they tell what you spend your points on? Are they going to treat those x number of bonus points separately?

If they just deposit points into your account, I don't see how they could limit what you spend them on.

I guess I was thinking of it differently.  I was thinking that the incentive to buy more indie games would come from the fact that people would get rewarded for buying them.  But since indie games aren't one of the categories that you can get rewarded for downloading that wouldn't actually be the case.  I wasn't talking about how the reward points could be spent, I was talking about how people could get reward points in the first place. 

But I'm not sure that people will be necessarily spending the free points on indie games.  If you have free points to spend, are you going to download an indie game that you won't be rewarded for buying or an arcade game that will lead to even more free points?  Some indie games might bet bought in the process if they're really stand-out games with marketing to get the word out, but if anything I can see the reward program taking away from people looking at indie games since indie games don't lead to more free points.

When I look at that list I'm mostly interested in people getting points from non-downloadable content things such as renewing a Gold membership or signing up for NetFlix. The lowest price point for Arcade games is (IIRC) 400 points, so 200 points won't get you an Arcade game unless you add more points. That's the scenario I'm thinking of: "user gets 200 free MSP and doesn't know what to do with them. While looking for cheap content they wander into Indie Games and see all of these low priced games (and hopefully sees the better games in the Highest Rated list to see that there's some quality content in here). NumberOfIndieGamesCustomers++;"

But yeah if someone who already buys Arcade games and gets a few points back on his next purchase, there probably won't be any benefit to XBLIG, just Arcade. which isn't a bad thing at all; more downloadable-content-purchasing gamers is always a good thing!