If you didn’t hear this already, today (Tuesday June 16th) XBox Live went down for maintenance. Now, it should be noted that Live is not just the “gold” XBox services that allow people to play games online, but their online storefronts and connectivity for a lot of titles. XBox live being down for the day means a lot of people won’t be making any sales today. Whether they be normal DLC, Arcade titles, or our own XBLCG/XBLIG service. In fact, if I’ve got my facts straight you can’t even PLAY Community Games when the Live services are unavailable. For some reason Community Games can’t be played without a net connection to Live. I’m not quite sure why this is, but today the world will fall silent, as XBox users will be unable to fly RC airplanes, watch virtual fish on their TVs, or try to use their controllers as a “massaging” implement. And us game developers? Well, we can keep making our games on our PCs, but we can’t get them onto the XBox to test, nor can we review other people’s games to get them up for sale on Live. XBox made their name for having the strongest showing in online features, so I’d be curious to know what the impact of Live being down for a day means, in dollars and cents. How many sales are lost and how much total developer time is lost when XBox becomes an offline-only console?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.