microsoft

Microsoft’s first foray into the video game business was a risky and expensive maneuver. Despite having Halo as a stellar launch title and hardware capable of feats its competition couldn’t possibly produce, the original Xbox failed to maintain the flash and evolution of its distant brother: the Xbox 360–which is nearly celebrating its 7^th anniversary on the market.

Console generations generally don’t exceed the pre-determined life expectancy predicted by its creators, but sometimes an unexpected boom of success prompts the decision makers to reconsider. Last November, Microsoft sold 1.7 million Xbox 360 consoles in the U.S., defeating Nintendo’s Wii and 3DS consoles by a large margin. Profit incites investors, potentially explaining why Microsoft has yet to formally announce a successor to its commercial darling. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is create competition for its own product.

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Microsoft has finally made a move to rectify one of the most longstanding and common complaints about the 360’s dashboard: Xbox Live Indie Games had extremely low visibility. Effective immediately, gamers will no longer be required to manipulate their way through the deepest bowels of the dash in order to peruse the list of available indie titles. A tile labeled “Indie” is now prominently located right underneath the Arcade square on the Games Marketplace.

Independent Xbox 360 developers are also about to get some more love in the form of an XBLIG companion app for Windows Phone 7. The app — currently being beta tested by a few select individuals — is said to be about 90 percent of the way to completion and will provide gamers with a simple way to keep up-to-date on the 360 indie scene. It works by yanking data from RSS feeds of blogs covering the XBLIG scene as well as the XML and CSV data from all the titles. In addition, the developers themselves will vote upon titles that they feel deserve to spotlighted on the service.

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Yet another indie developer has berated the design of the new Xbox Dashboard. Comments from Kris Steele, developer of Hypership Out of Control, echo those from a long line of indie developers who have expressed concern over the new dashboard, most of whom claim Microsoft has effectively “buried” Xbox Live Indie Games.

In a heated blog-post, Steele analysed sales data from two of his games available on XBLIG; Hypership Out of Control – released in 2010 – and its sequel, Hypership Still Out of Control – released January of this year with Microsoft’s new dashboard in effect.

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Budget-conscious gamers curious to discover what all the Xbox Live Gold fuss is about can find out by taking it for a free test drive now through Sunday. …
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We wanted it and it seems like you all wanted it too when the results came in at PlayXBLA for the A Kingdom of Keflings DLC voting and they …
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After long deliberation on who’s coming to the party first, we finally have details from prices to release dates on the upcoming House Party promotion, starting February 15.

First …
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In a recent Microsoft announced that Xbox Live has hit 40 million users, and has added 5 million users in the last 5 months alone. Microsoft also announced …
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Microsoft, in an attempt to prevent Xbox Live accounts from being compromised, has apparently added more rigorous security standards to Xbox.com, according to a report emanating from Eurogamer. Certain malicious individuals were previously able to gain access to other users’ XBL accounts by using what is known as a “brute-force method.” The site was allowing said parties to infinitely attempt Windows Live ID passwords — a process that was automated by use of a script.

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While Microsoft’s CES keynote focused mostly on sales numbers and non-Xbox news, we did get a couple gems out of it. One of the most interesting tidbits is the …
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So it’s not a free game like last year’s Summer of Arcade but we’ll take free points any day of the week. Microsoft has slowly been rolling out the …
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