Xbox One retail, Arcade and Indie Games will just be ‘Games’

In the above screenshot of the Xbox One dashboard, you will notice that the categories above lists “Games” alongside other categories like “TV & Movies” and “Music” with equal representation. This matches our current Xbox 360 dashboard. However, in the Xbox 360, “Games” is further divided into categories such as “featured,” “arcade,” “on demand,” “indie,” etc. Each category represents the different tiers of games in expected presentation, length, genre, and pricing. Obviously, our own website is based exclusively around the Arcade games.

Well, it looks like all that will change with the Xbox One. In an interview with Eurogamer, Microsoft VP Phil Harrison said the following:

Phil Harrison: In the past we had retail games which came on disc, we had Xbox Live Arcade and we had Indie Games, and they had their own discrete channels or discrete silos. With Xbox One and the new marketplace, they’re games. We don’t make a distinction between whether a game is a 50-hour RPG epic or whether it is a puzzle game or whether it is something that fits halfway between the two–

Eurogamer: So no Xbox Live Arcade, no Xbox Live Indie Games – just games?

Phil Harrison: Just games, right. Search, recommendation, what your friends are playing, game DVR – these all go to helping you discover the games you want to play, so I think we solve fantastically some of the challenges that independent developers face, particularly around discovery and connecting their game to an audience, by some of the platform features we have in the machine itself.

It seems like there will still be smaller games being released digitally only like the past eight years, but eliminating the classification leaves quite some ambiguity as to how they will be marketed, priced, and distributed on the system.

As for how this affects XBLAfans.com, we’re not sure. With all this news breaking and more still to come, we will have to see how the dust settles when everything is on the table. One thing is certain: we’re not going anywhere.

Source: Eurogamer