40 Days #22: WTF is up with that Auto Downloads thing?

Peter — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:10:53 GMT

I really don't know what to say about this one. The Auto Downloads feature has been in the Dashboard over the last few updates, originally in the Xbox Live Arcade section, now in the new Games Library.

The way it was supposed to work is that once you were in the Arcade (and I guess now in the Games Library?), new trials of Arcade Games would automatically start downloading from the Marketplace. So let's say on Wednesday morning you could go into the Arcade, and new trials would get queued for download.

However, in real life I just had way too many problems with this setup:

While at one point the dashboard had a notification that told you when a download started, this was taken out (please bring it back!), so even though the auto downloads generally worked, you didn't see anything happen. You would have to go into your active download list or wait for the notification that a download was complete.
If there were two or more new games on the service (which started happening more often after the feature was introduced), it seemed to only pick up one of them. If you went back into Arcade later, it would check again and download another one, and so forth.
It didn't really fit into a typical flow of dashboard navigation. Normally I would go to the Marketplace to check for new content, not to the Arcade and then wait around and hope something was actually being downloaded.

In the last dashboard update the feature was simplified back to its original state from two updates ago, when it offered a choice of downloading only new releases or anything you didn't have (which was supposed to quickly give you a plethora of games you hadn't played). So Microsoft does at least seem to be tweaking this functionality over time.

Right now it seems really out of place too, since it handles Arcade games, yet it appears in the new Games Library section, which aggregates all digitally distributed games, including demos, yet you still can't auto download anything but Arcade games.

The dashboard team does need to make a few changes to make sure this feature doesn't end up being one of those buttons nobody uses but everybody glares at suspiciously:

Bring back the option of popping up a notification when a download starts. This would make the Auto Downloads appear to actually do something, and it would also be useful in situations when downloads are interrupted and you don't know when they resume.
Make it run in the background, no matter where you are in the dashboard. So I can just turn on the console, and have it immediately start downloading new games.
Enable an option to automatically download new demos too, with filtering settings by size range and/or genre.
Ultimately roll it into system-wide auto downloads based on search queries from the Marketplace.

The Auto Downloads feature was certainly a good idea, but the current implementation leaves me wondering how many gamers could possibly be using it in its current state. Just make it more transparent, let it run all the time, and we might be on the road to a more intelligent console.

Playing on Easy : Auto Downloads

40 Days #22: WTF is up with that Auto Downloads thing?