Yesterday saw the launch of the newly renamed Xbox Indie Games, formerly Xbox LIVE Community Games. With the renaming comes some new features for indie developers such as the addition of Japan and Germany to its supported countries to submit software and a reputation system which will allow people to score games. Developers now have the opportunity to hand out up to 50 Tokens to the community as review copies for example and last but not least a new pricing structure.
As a developer myself, the changes are a good improvement on the system. The new pricing structure is especially important as it now allows developers to charge 80 points ($1) for their software if it is under 50MB in size. This price has proved to be popular on the iPhone apps store and I would expect this to do as well. The reputation system will hopefully be put to good use and sort out the wheat from the chaff, of which there is unfortunately a lot which can make the Indie Games section very poor at a glance. What I would like to see improved in the future is better promotion for the good games, the Tokens may help in this department as it will give reviewers a chance to try a variety of games and get them more noticed as at the moment not many indie games are making it to mainstream sites.
The full details on the changes can be found at the XNA Creators Club website at http://creators.xna.com/.
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