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On one hand I really like the convenience of digital content delivery through the Xbox Live Marketplace. A few button presses, and you have a new game available to play.
On the other hand, I am a big fan of Cheap Ass Gamer - a site that revolves around finding deals, steals, and all sorts of discounts. People discuss weekly retailer ads, post coupons, point to online sales and discounts, and generally talk about combining all these resources to make sure you get great deals on games. It's a fun "game" to play in real life, and the site has saved me a ton of money over the years. In fact, I hardly ever buy any game at its full retail price without at least getting some sort of freebie incentive. However, that habit hits a brick wall when it comes to purchasing content on the Marketplace.
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Every so often I get jealous of a specific game or feature that PS3 fans can enjoy. One of those games is Warhawk, a seemingly fun downloadable title that also demonstrates one thing that the PS3 currently has but the Xbox 360 does not: the availability of large original downloadable games.
The Xbox Live Marketplace offers original games, but just within the smaller Arcade size limits. There are also large pieces of new content like the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion, and later this year GTA IV's expansion pieces. Then there were temporary large "games": the online beta programs for Halo 3, Shadowrun, and COD4. Finally, you can now download full copies of last-gen Xbox games. However, none of these channels of the Marketplace currently allow for something like Warhawk.
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One of the most thought-provoking screenshots from the now seemingly forgotten Windows Mobile Live Anywhere client is the image seen here on the right. It depicts a notification that a new piece of content is available for a particular game title.
That doesn't seem so far fetched, until you consider that the current console and Marketplace system has no provision for granular notifications like this. The 360 only ever "knows" about new content when you go into some Marketplace screen, and it refreshes the content from the servers.
But what if it could know? How would this work? If Microsoft had a PC-based Marketplace, it would make sense to allow gamers to use plain old RSS feeds to subscribe to various sources of news from the Marketplace itself. Just like buyers can create RSS feeds based on the results of a specific query search on eBay, the Marketplace should be able to provide custom RSS feeds for content searches. For example you could subscribe to a feed about new items for Call of Duty 4. Then any time a new piece of content matching those criteria hits the Marketplace, your favorite RSS reader can let you know.
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Once Microsoft puts in place some of the infrastructure features like the connected standby power mode and a web-based version of the Xbox Live Marketplace, the resulting combination logically culminates with a need for a method to remotely tell the waiting console that you want to download a particular item you are looking at in a browser on your PC.
Remote downloading is a feature that Sony already has working through their PSP/PS3 remote play integration. Microsoft themselves showed off a prototype version of a mobile means of remotely scheduling downloads when the company showed off their Windows Mobile Live Anywhere client. Better yet, Microsoft already has such a system working elsewhere: it's exactly what their MSN Remote Record service and client do for Media Center PCs. The system consists of a small client that connects to a web service, and the TV guide program listing website, which lets you schedule individual and recurring series recordings right from your browser, even when you are away from home. The Xbox version would work pretty much the same way: the console would be turned on or in the online standby mode, be connected to a download web service, and add items to the download queue as necessary.
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Over the last couple of dashboard updates, Microsoft has slowly been refining the New Arrivals section of the Xbox Live Marketplace. Currently it quickly sorts content by type, making it easy to search for just new movies, games, or TV shows, for instance.
However, despite the multiple revisions, this feature still sports an issue that aggravates me to no end whenever I use it. The problem is that just like the Spotlight section that features a variety of old and new content - the same set for all users, the New Arrivals screen is also the same for all gamers. It is a list of what is new on the Marketplace, for everybody.
That means that if I go look at the list in the morning, and then later again in the evening, I keep seeing the same content. It may have been new to me the first time I saw it, but not after that. I wish the dashboard somehow kept track of what I had looked at, and either took those games off the New Arrivals list, or perhaps more sensibly (so that the list doesn't have to be totally recreated for each user), somehow dimmed the games that I had looked into. Sort of like marking your e-mail messages read. If I open up a game in the list to see the new items "inside" it, mark it as viewed, and thus not "new" anymore.
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As I already mentioned a few days ago, previewing gamer pictures and themes on the Xbox Live Marketplace isn't exactly a shining example of user friendly interfaces. Part of that problem is that there is no easy way to look at the plethora of Marketplace content on your computer when you are away from the console.
It's not that people aren't trying to fix this in different ways. For a while there was a site called Dashboard Themes which let you preview and comment on the various dashboard themes in the Marketplace. Unfortunately, it has since gone under due to a lack of resources. Individual content suppliers like Disruptive Publishers maintain their own preview sites, but they don't cover all the content. Microsoft also has a Marketplace section of Xbox.com, but that site isn't the easiest to navigate, and it also doesn't always include all the latest content that is available on the console.
What Microsoft really needs to do is launch a complete interface to the Marketplace which can be accessed through a browser on a computer.
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As the Arcade section of the Xbox 360 Dashboard slowly matured, it sprouted some pretty neat features that tied into the Xbox Live community. For instance, you could see leaderboards for your friends - outside of the game. You could also quickly send a message to a friend, telling them about the game or a feature of it, just by selecting a recipient and a message template. The new Games Library can even show you friends who are playing online right now. All those are good ideas that reinforce the fact that you are connected to a large network of other gamers, a number of whom you somehow know.
The last dashboard update also brought us the somewhat controversial Friends of Friends feature, which made a lot of secretive gamers scramble to change their settings, and restrict the traversal of their friends lists. These little touches show that Microsoft is embracing scary contemporary trends like Facebook and social networking features that seem to pervade every popular product these days. Fair enough. You've got 10 million users, so why not link them together and make the network more social. At the same time, there is one place where this type of social integration would make perfect sense, yet it it's present at the moment: the Xbox Live Marketplace.
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Another day, another story about the "broken" DRM in the Xbox Live Marketplace. Sadly, these days I can actually relate. My launch 360 died just before Christmas last year (Mass Effect did it in), and after a few weeks I got an apparently pretty old refurb. That of course meant that all my downloaded content - which was tied to the original, now dead console - was only accessible while my account was signed into Xbox Live.
There are really two issues that people encounter when this happens. First, you can't use the content when you are offline. I personally don't really care about this scenario, since apart from actual service outages (like the month or so after Christmas), I am usually signed into the service all the time anyway. The second problem, which unfortunately affects our household, is that other gamer accounts on the console can't use the content on their own. So for example, Monica can't play the downloaded Arcade games while signed in under her account. That's annoying.
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I was really disappointed last year that Nintendo - the company that doesn't ever seem to do very much right in the online department - beat Microsoft to the one obvious feature that you'd want to see in an online network that has both users and content to sell: the ability to gift downloadable content to other members. Months later, with just hours until Christmas, Microsoft debuted a lame point-gifting system that was in beta at the time, and seems to be completely deactivated now. How it is that Microsoft - who celebrated the fifth anniversary of its Xbox Live service - still hasn't implemented this sort of thing, is beyond me.
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