40 Days #39: Set up a formal beta program and offer it to other developers

One of the most exciting aspects of having a networked gaming service like Xbox Live with many enthusiastic gamers is the emergence of public beta testing programs for games.

We've seen betas for Shadowrun, Halo 3, COD 4 in the past, and new beta programs are being planned for Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and Battlefield: Bad Company. All good stuff, and I wish more developers joined this trend, even for single-player aspects of games.

Given that Microsoft has had an internal Microsoft Game Studios beta program available for a while, why not spin off a general Xbox Live testing program? Let the public sign up and go through a selection process that tries to establish some sort of bar for quality (good luck there), then separate the willing volunteers into various demographic groups based on age, gender, experience, and even genre preferences.

Run a tight program where you keep track of all these little details as well as tester scheduling, and then offer these slaves to third-party developers. Not every company has the resources to manage their own beta program, so being able to outsource the dirty work and community connections, and just get back the testing data should be pretty attractive. And I bet a lot of gamers would jump on the opportunity to play unreleased games and perhaps try to make them better prior to release. At least that's what we all hope happens. No need for free incentives for every single game test - people would already be getting extra play time to begin with - but perhaps institute an incentive program for active or long-term beta testers. Plus, of course, distribute any free stuff donated by the developers.

Ultimately, beta testing games by at least somewhat responsible gaming members of the public should lead to an overall improvement in the quality of games, so a formalized beta program that would be easy to handle for both game players and game developers could only help.

40 Days #38: Roll out premium precision controllers

It is common knowledge that there is a lot of money in accessories. It is also common knowledge that most third-party accessories are shoddily-made crap.

Given all that, whatever happened to Microsoft's plans for a premium wireless controller? Backlit buttons, rubber grips, a better D-pad - sounds like a winner to me. It wouldn't be a first for Microsoft either - they already produce the massively under-utilized Big Button controllers for Scene It. Sony also has a premium accessory in their recently announced DualShock 3 controller. And, of course, Nintendo keeps churning out mostly useless - yet not free - pieces of plastic for their Wii controllers too.

40 Days #37: Treat the Xbox Live Marketplace more like a retail store and have sale events

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.

40 Days #36: Make the dashboard resistant to Xbox Live outages

This screen clip is both hilarious and disturbing, because it was actually real at one point during the Great Christmas Xbox Live outage of 2007. I am not going to reopen the discussion of why that outage happened or how it was handled - that's all been beaten to death, repeatedly.

However, during that troubled period there was one thing that really worried me. Seemingly because the Xbox 360's dashboard is so closely linked to the service, when Xbox Live was broken, so was the console.

Signing in took forever, bringing up the various dashboard blades was massively delayed, and in general the whole console was acting flaky for weeks. Given the 360's already tarnished hardware reliability reputation, I - along with many other gamers - was seriously worried that my console was dying.

This console flakiness just worsened the already pretty unhappy service situation, because not only were gamers unable to play online, but even doing anything offline was an awful experience. At one point it was so bad that I was contemplating just yanking the network cable, but ended up just not using the console during much of that period.

40 Days #35: Turn the dashboard into a videoconferencing powerhouse

A common complaint about the Xbox 360 dashboard is the lack of the multi-person chats that were available on the original Xbox. Microsoft says it comes down to how the available bandwidth is allocated. Despite assurances that the Xbox team is "listening", nothing much has changed since the launch of the console. This has led to pretty sad how-to articles like this one, which describes how to use Xbox Live to provide chat capability for Super Smash Bros. Brawl - with the caveat that you actually need a game like Halo 3 to establish a multi-person chat environment.

40 Days #34: Let the dashboard suspend and resume any game in progress

Look, games are getting longer these days. Some games let you save at any time, some do not. Some have frequent checkpoints that you can use to resume the game when you come back to it, some handle this much less gracefully. Even Arcade games like Commanders: Attack of the Genos now have levels that can last 30-45 minutes.

On the other side of the coin, gamers have less and less time these days. They have jobs, families, responsibilities. The casual folks are looking for bite-sized game experiences, and even the hardcore sometimes just have to go do something else. You know, to an event with the spouse, to feed the kids, to run out when somebody calls. Life sometimes cuts in, and in a lot of cases the next save location or checkpoint is just too far away.

40 Days #33: Expose dashboard features through setup wizards

Another day, another story about a kid experiencing something inappropriate over Xbox Live. Sadly, these things will happen and Microsoft can't do all that much about it. The Xbox 360 already has a fairly robust system of parental controls, and Microsoft recently even launched a family timer to physically limit play times.

In a way, Xbox Live is a victim of its own success. The Wii has such restricted online features that nothing too offensive can physically be done at all, and because of the limited functionality, not all that many people play any given game online to begin with. Sony's console had (and still does to a lesser extent) a high price tag, so its adoption rate into families was much slower. Also, the online network isn't quite polished yet, so again, you have fewer people using it.

However, Xbox Live is not only the most popular online system on consoles today, but it is also the most full-featured one, so the millions of active users have many ways to send something inappropriate through the network. Microsoft is trying to push it as a family console, it has good brand recognition and a reasonable price. As a result, a lot of families and kids play games on the console and on Xbox Live. And again, Microsoft can't do much more than the user reporting/banning that they take care of already.

40 Days #32: Come up with a strategy and a name for large new downloadable games

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.

40 Days #31: Open up XNA and Live Anywhere to browser-based gaming

Every so often, when Cindy Lou Grue would post on the Gamerscore Blog (by the way, is she still even on the team?), I would get a little shocked because she would remind me that Microsoft's MSN Games casual game portal still exists. The other bloggers would be going on about their gamerscores, friends lists, multiplayer experiences, and Cindy's posts would always feel oddly "disconnected".

That makes you wonder why exactly Microsoft isn't doing something, anything, to somehow integrate the casual portal into the rest of its gaming network. They even have a section of of MSN games for Vista - the perfect example of "games for Windows" - and yet none of those integrates with the Live network. I'm not even asking for them to be distributed through a PC marketplace (well, sure, eventually, but anything at all would be a start), but why aren't those games part of the Games for Windows Live program? Some of them even have counterparts available on Xbox Live Arcade, so it just seems weird to see them as completely isolated experiences.

40 Days #30: Store everything in the big fluffy Live Anywhere cloud

So let's say that we can actually save an extended gamer profile and all of our console settings onto a memory unit or hard drive. But then the Xbox 360 overheats and explodes, and there go all the hard-earned game saves and console tweaks. Where's the backup plan?

The real question is: where is the online backup plan? Xbox Live is one big network service in the cloud, which already stores a ton of information for each user. So why doesn't each Xbox Live account - the paying ones at the very least - have an "online memory card" that can hold a gamer profile, console settings, and game saves?

40 Days #29: Have a theme, will travel? Not quite!

Ever since I got my second Xbox 360 console and started shuttling my gamer profile between the two on a memory unit, I noticed a peculiar thing that happens to my profile with respect to themes.

The usual scenario when I get a new theme is to first go download it on one console (the "primary", now replaced console where Monica can also use the content), and then go re-download it on the second console. Usually I will also switch to the new theme on the first console after it comes down.

When I first sign in on the second console, the new theme isn't available just yet. However, my gamer profile on the memory unit seems to know what my current theme should be, and since it can't find it, resets it to the default built-in one. Makes sense, right? Well, not completely. The thing is that if you bring up the Guide or if one of those notification blades slides out, you will notice that the Guide is still skinned with the new theme - despite the fact that it is not actually available on the second console.

40 Days #28: Bake all the XNA launchers into the Games Library

Ever since the recent announcement of the Xbox Live Community Games initiative, I have actually motivated myself enough to download XNA Game Studio 2.0 and start looking at the integration between the development tools and the console. Sure, local connectivity between Xbox 360 and computer already existed before, but the the announcement added an Xbox Live launcher to the mix.

What immediately struck me was just how complicated the launcher situation is right now. Regular, non-developer gamers need quite detailed instructions on how to download the new launcher and then the preview games. Part of the confusion is the availability of a number of seemingly different launcher bits - some for Xbox Live, some for connecting to a development machine, and so forth.

Microsoft really needs to combine all of these versions into one XNA client which can figure out whether you have a Creators Club subscription, then enable extra connectivity options when you do, and let everybody else download games over Xbox Live. One smarter client with maybe an extra button or two, and it should take care of all the possible combinations. Games written using the current development tools seem to exist outside the launcher anyway, so there really shouldn't be a need for another copy of it. And, of course, the whole thing just needs to be rolled into the spring dashboard update, so that all Xbox 360 owners have direct access to future community games, without the hassle of figuring out which XNA bits they need to manually download.

40 Days #27: Emancipate the Games for Windows Live dashboard

Making Games for Windows Live free to play online should lead to more users on the Windows platform and more developers using the functionality. However, all those parties probably won't be very impressed with the current state of the "dashboard" part of GfWL software.

The biggest problem with it, all the more incomprehensible, given that Microsoft is a huge software company, is that the dashboard can only be accessed through the individual GfWL titles. It doesn't exist independently without them. Ironically, as far as Windows is concerned, the software actually is a bit independent, as it represents a separate item in the list of installed programs, with seemingly one shared set of libraries and code. Any updates to it are shared among all the installed titles on the system.

40 Days #26: Make Games for Windows Live more attractive to developers and free to consumers

Once online play on Xbox Live goes free, it only makes sense to maintain parity on the PC side and extend the same benefits to Games for Windows Live customers. In fact, that's what it should have been to begin with. GfWL should have launched as a completely free service from day one for a number of reasons. For one, PC gamers don't normally pay for online gaming anyway, so charging for it over Xbox Live doomed the brand right away and labeled Microsoft as a even more of a money whore in the eyes of PC gamers than before. Also, even if Microsoft eventually wanted to make money from premium add-ons, the service should have been free at least for an initial "introductory" period of, say, a year or so.

40 Days #25: Set online play free across Xbox Live

Microsoft's big trump card in terms of competing with Nintendo and especially Sony is Xbox Live. In 2008, in order to combat Sony's recently improving luck, Microsoft will have to make some drastic improvements to their online service, so as to remind people that they still have something special that nobody else has.

The two basic ways of accomplishing this are introducing a host of massive improvements and making online play free. The latter really needs to happen this year, and not even primarily because Sony lets their gamers play for free.

No, the real reason why online gaming on Xbox Live needs to become gratis is the one segment of the gaming populace that Microsoft still doesn't seem to be able to snag: the casuals. The thing with online gaming is that it has become completely commoditized. Even simple little flash games offer leaderboards, gamer profiles, and sometimes actual online play. Then you have even more fleshed out online efforts like EA's Battlefield Heroes. Most (non-MMO) PC games have had free online multiplayer components for years. And, of course, both Sony and Nintendo allow free online play on both their home consoles and portables.