40 Days #19: Sort out the Xbox Live Arcade game size limits

Lately it's not too much fun being an Xbox 360 owner that isn't so poor that kidneys and other organs have to be sold in dark alleys. Look, I had an original Xbox. It had a hard drive. I thought that was a swell idea. Now I have two Xbox 360s, and I might even add a third before the end of the year. These units also have hard drives. Monica and I even have memory units - the 512 MB kind - to shuttle our profiles and game saves between the consoles. I have all these optional accessories, which can be bought for relatively high sums of money, so that I can experience the best of what the Xbox 360 world has to offer - a lot of downloadable content, ever-improving Arcade games, downloadable movies, and so forth.

There are people out there who want to game, yet can't afford all this. I understand that. I also realize that Microsoft wants, no needs, to stick a console in as many homes as humanly possible, and in order to do that, there has to be a cheap version on store shelves. That only impacts me inasmuch I want the console to do well, so that I can enjoy more and better games.

However, what really sucks lately is being one of these owners who has sent a lot of money Redmond's way, and yet being told that I can expect sub-par games precisely because there are those less fortunate Xbox owners out there somewhere.

What I am talking about is the ugly issue of the 360's not always present hard drive. As an original Xbox owner, I thought Microsoft's inclusion of the 8 GB hard drive was a real innovation at the time. I never even had a memory card at all for that console, unlike the PS2 and GameCube. That's why I was more than a little surprised when Microsoft unveiled the specifications of the Xbox 360, and the hard drive turned out to be optional. You either jumped to 20 GB or had to use 64 MB memory units, with nothing in between.

Ironically, many of the people who bought 360s at launch were hardcore games, who didn't want the disk-less Core models. Some of those people got stuck with them when the Premiums sold out, but I doubt a lot of buyers at that time went out with the specific masochistic intent to buy a Core model. Later, as the console got more popular, and kids with not-quite-large-enough piggy banks begged their parents, this did indeed happen, but not initially.

What did happen initially were the dire predictions; since developers could no longer rely on the hard drive being present (a de facto downgrade from the previous console), this would split gamers into haves and have nots, and all developers would have to aim for the lowest common denominator: the great unwashed masses. Over the last two years, developers have complained, but have managed to make things work in most cases.

At the same time, Microsoft has allowed at least certain games to require the hard drive, backward compatibility for all original Xbox games demands it, as do the downloadable Xbox Originals, and there are also exceptions in recent games like Burnout Paradise, which requires the hard drive for online play.

The main point here is that despite the existence of the drive-less Core/Arcade models, the general population of Xbox 360 owners is generally not punished for the presence of these less capable units in the homes of some gamers.

Oddly enough, this is less and less the case in the area of Xbox Live Arcade games. About a year ago, Microsoft introduced new 512 MB memory units and raised the size limit on Arcade games from the original 50 MB to 150. The 50 Mb limit made sense given the original 64 MB memory units - you could fit each game onto the memory unit. Sure, just one at time, but it could be done. So why 150 MB when you have 512 MB of storage? Even taking into consideration the space lost due to formatting, the new MUs hold over 450 MB of data. So why not, say, a 400 MB size limit?

Maybe they were already planning for the introduction of the Core replacement - the Arcade model - which came with a 256 MB memory unit. (By the way, this is yet another one of those "Why, Microsoft, why?!" moments. They were already making 512 MB cards, so why introduce another separate item for factory lines to produce in the 256 MB MU, which isn't otherwise available separately? Why couldn't they have just bundled the 512 MB version? Was the extra flash memory really that much more expensive?)

Anyway, with the Arcade model introduction, you could still have 200 MB Arcade games. Of course, even here the justification is awfully weak. After all, the original Core didn't come with any MU at all, and games were sized so that you could go out, buy a memory unit, and all games would fit. By the same logic, if we had 400 MB games today, gamers without a hard drive could go out, buy a memory unit - in this case it would just have to be the 512 MB one - and all games would fit on it. Moreover, since some full Xbox 360 games can require the hard drive, why not just have some Arcade games that do too? Especially since you can't enjoy each and every aspect of the Xbox 360/Live experience without a hard drive anyway. Microsoft knows it. Gamers and developers know it. The Core/Arcade owners are second-class citizens, and that can be just fine given that Microsoft so badly needs to cut costs and prices. Just don't penalize the rest of us for the existence of that minority.

Microsoft's justification of the size limit is that they want developers to create efficient, quick to develop, download and play games. That makes sense on paper. If they didn't enforce some limits, then many developers could submit bloated code or try to create games that would take too many resources and too much time, resulting in a price that may seem too high for a downloadable game. This policy resulted in some nimble footwork and neat approaches to game development, especially during the 50 MB era - just look at RoboBlitz.

At the same time, how can you tack a size limit on creativity? What if somebody comes up with a great game, with a fully fleshed out story, awesome gameplay, beautiful visuals and music - all for a paltry 200 MB? Compression doesn't help any further, so now what? Cut levels, shorten the story, downgrade the quality? Do those extra 50 MB really matter to Microsoft all that much?

Another reason why Microsoft stubbornly doesn't want to budge on the size limit may be the nature of the service itself. Xbox Live Arcade is supposed to be all about small, pick-up-and-play games, with low prices and small sizes. But what if somebody wants to create something just a little larger? If it's not an Arcade game anymore, then where does it go? The Xbox Live Marketplace doesn't have any other avenue to deliver full-fledged digital-only games, apart from Xbox Originals (which is just a way to deliver the nostalgia of old Xbox games). At some point, Microsoft needs to add a way to distribute large, more-expensive non-Arcade titles over Xbox Live.

Right now, developers seem to be hitting the sort of gray area between the traditional "arcade" games and this new, more full-fledged category, hence all the complaints about size limits. Microsoft really needs to do a couple of things to alleviate the rapidly worsening problem:

• Raise the limit for what is to be considered as "arcade" game to at least 200 MB, ideally probably to around 250-400 MB. The 400 MB limit should be enough for some time, and would be a hard separator to cut off the "arcade" category. Also, all such games would still fit on a currently available memory unit.
• Limit the prices on the "arcade" games to about $15-20 on the high end, for the 400 MB games. That way all "arcade" games would have prices within a known range, and the prices would probably want to be somewhat proportional to the size of the game.
• Add a new Marketplace section for full, original, digitally distributed games. These would range from 400-500 MB upwards, require the hard drive, and cost more.
• Even if the limit is raised to only 200 MB - or not even raised at all, which would be a mistake though - work with developers, and if they are doing all that they can, but they still can't cram it into the required size (especially to keep the quality and content on par with versions for competing online services), make an exception. Let them publish it, and put in a big warning that the game may require a hard drive or a larger memory unit. Since there don't seem to be any XBLA-bound games pushing 400 MB, that really should not be a problem, given the availability of the 512 MB memory units.

As an owner of Xbox 360s that do have hard drives, I really do not want to be hearing news like Capcom downgrading the quality of Bionic Commando: Rearmed and possibly even SSFIITHR compared to PSN versions of those games, just because Microsoft has an arbitrary size limit in place. Microsoft is the one that has to prove its worth this year, since Sony is looking to have a pretty good year with the PS3. And despite the bravado of claiming a higher installed base, consumers usually follow quality, and not the herd. So a better Bionic Commando on the PS3 for the same price will sell more copies - even if it is months down the line when the PS3 catches up to the 360 because developers can't actually fulfill their creative vision on the 360 due to arbitrary numbers somebody typed into a box somewhere.

Penny Arcade's game is supposed to hit XBLA this summer. I would be quite surprised if it fit into 150 MB, as well as each of the sequels. I certainly don't want the series to be cut down from its PC counterpart, or for the developers to move to the PSN. I also don't care if it is labeled as an Arcade game or is part of some new digital-only full game store. Hear that, Microsoft? You have until summer to get all this sorted out, and make us non-Core/Arcade hardware owners actually feel like we didn't waste our money buying all those storage accessories.