I just read this article, http://www.endsights.com/2009/07/14/xbox-live-arcade-becoming-more-restrictive-to-independent-developers/ . It was a pretty standard article until I noticed this paragraph - "Making matters worse, Jenkins suggestion that independent developers look to Community Games for their releases is borderline insulting. In fact, it is straight up insulting. The Community Games platform is a failed experiment and has no commercial incentive to any serious developer"

Now I know this is the opinion of one person, but I hope that its not a growing opinion. I certainly hope that its not Microsofts opinion at some point ether. As the owner of 24KT Studios, I started in the low budget/independent film and music business. I have just recently got involved in gaming and our first release should be out by September. To me, the community games section is the best feature of Xbox Live. I browse it every day, trying new releases and buying the ones I enjoy. I look at it this way, if your a low budget film maker, you have virtually zero pecent chance of turning a profit. You have to just enjoy making films. The community section is like if low budget film makers could just submit their movie to Best Buy and it would be on store shelves within the month. Theres no way that could or would happen. The community section lets regular guys like me and everyone else who makes games for it, have our real jobs and careers pay our bills and make games on the side or as a hobby and have a real chance of atleast making a little spending money on. Its not going to make anyone rich. But it will make all of us visible and give us an avenue to sell our products and maybe even get noticed by bigger studios to turn game making into a career. To me the community section is a dream come true. On January 6, 2009, Microsoft announced there were 17 million members on Xbox Live. So we potentially have our games put in front of that many people. With the new features coming down the pipeline, such as the rating system and avatar and party system intregration, I can only see this great part of Xbox Live getting even better. I think with a tad more help with advertising the section from Microsofts side and just a tad of quality control(stop the massage and picture gallery "games" please!) I think it could atleast compete with the arcade section at some point quality wise and maybe even be a viable route for bigger indie developers.

Don't worry about it. That's what journalists do. They take a paragraph full of nothing, and spin it into whatever story they want to tell, and make money off the ad views from their traffic.

Daaark:

That's what journalists do.

Actually thats not what real journalists do.

Its what wannbe-pretend-web-'journalists' do becuase they can't get a proper journalist job.

Even real journalists tend to first decide on the story, and then go out and collect information, and discard whatever doesn't fit with their story.

Or, if you're lucky, they will find "two sides" of a story, and represent each side with a small soundbite out of context, and then not do much work to figure out whether one of the sides have, say, 100 times more scientific weight behind it or not. That way, they can claim impartiality, although the reader won't know that two seemingly equally weighted sides are actually representing well-accepted science vs the lunatic fringe.

That's not much different than it's ever been, though. Real investigative journalism is expensive and risky, and hence very rare.

That being said, I think we can't say yea or nay on the indie games until something like three years after launch. We still have a bit to go :-)

Check out this other article of his:

While the games are undoubtedly easier to create on Microsoft’s XNA platform, I was still at a complete loss when I tried to test out their development tools — which means that you actually need talent to create these games — and I have none.

I don't think there's any better response to this besides the following emoticon: :3