XBLIG gets a new home in the Dashboard
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.
Users can jump right into their XBL accounts from their phones and remotely download and install any releases found on the app that pique their interest. Droid and iOS versions will “most likely” follow after the Windows Phone release date, which is yet to be finalized.
Sources: Major Nelson and David Yoyles