Downloadable content. I like it. I’ve been a big fan of it for a while now, of games getting a little bit something extra after release. It can be a little painful to have to pay for them, but the amounts generally aren’t that much, and if that’s what it takes for developers to put in some extra work and revitalize my old games, I’m all for it. Unfortunately, it seems that some developers may be trying to skip the “extra work” part.

Resident Evil 5 Versus, a downloadable expansion to Resident Evil 5 which added competitive multiplayer modes to the game, was released yesterday. Seeing as how the full game was only released less than a month prior, the announcement of such a DLC pack drew quick criticism. The angry internet mobs were convinced that Versus was already on the disc, should rightfully belong to the owners of said discs, and should not require a DLC pack, that Capcom was clearly just using to get more money out of us consumers, since it essentially only unlocks content we already own.

Capcom was quick to respond, saying that Versus didn’t fit into the original scope of the game. It required its own budget for development and other associated costs.

It was grueling and took a long two hours, but after killing approximately 2000 undead Nazi, our team finally made it to Round 24 in Nazi Zombies on the new Verruckt map that came with Map Pack 1 for Call of Duty: World at War. It’s quite an achievement for us. It means we’ve matched our record on the original Nazi Zombie’s map, a feat that also matched the development team’s, that made Nazi Zombies, record before the game was released to the public.

Sadly, there’s a lot of glitching going on in Nazi Zombies. So much so that the leaderboards are pretty much a joke. Hitting Round 24 got us into the top 8000 spots, but I can’t help but wonder where we’d be at if the top thousand players, at least, hadn’t cheated to get their 1000 Rounds Survived placements. I’m also curious to see what the actual highest number of rounds survived is. I’m sure it would give countless numbers of players something to shoot for, seeing what’s actually doable and trying to top it.

What I don’t understand is where’s the fun in cheating your way to Round 2100? The rounds get really long and you have to kill hundred upon thousands of undead, which should take the better part of a day or more. If you could do it for real, sure, it’d be extremely exciting, but glitching takes all the risk out of it. You just stand there and shoot. What’s the point of that?  At least in Dead Rising, you got an awesome weapon after killing 50,000 some odd zombies. I was bored as hell doing that, but at least there was a reward at the end. You don’t even get EXP in Nazi Zombies.

I understand the appeal of getting to the top of a leaderboard, but imagining what the number one must have gone through to get there, the lonely, extremely dull experience, was it worth it?

Maybe we should start our own leaderboard. What’s the highest you’ve gotten?

With indie games being such a big deal recently, the subject of sales and success were bound to come up at GDC. What I’ve heard doesn’t sound to good though, as numerous reports from the show seem to indicate that while any random piece of software developed for the iPhone may generate substantial revenue, the same can not be said for self distribution over the web or, sadly, the NXE’s XNA Community Games channel.

This has been on my mind recently, since you may or may not know that I am also making a game for XNA Community Games. Rather than try to come up with another outlet for me to get my game out there, I’m more interested in figuring out why XNA games aren’t doing so well, and what I can do to get around that.

Quality of games aside, I think the biggest hurdle for XNA games to get over is promotion. From GameIndustry.biz, via Joystiq:

Speaking at GDC, Sony development relations manager Chris Eden warned self-publishers of downloadable titles about the perils of poor marketing, saying promotion-shy developers often send their brainchildren "out to die lonely and unloved."

Looking around on the web, there really is no substantial coverage for good XNA titles, much less the mediocre ones. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be promoting the Community Games channel. Even developer self promotion seems to be pretty lacking.

So it looks like we have games no one knows about, sitting on a shelf only some people are aware of, but these people are price conscious consumers, and since they can’t find out about the games on the shelf, how worthwhile they are and such, they don’t buy them.

This has got to change.

Any XNA developers out there want to cross promote?