Originally Published on August 10, 2017
Now that the shutdown of the indie games storefront on Xbox Live has taken place, I think the biggest concern for gamers that purchased titles will be whether they still have access to the games they paid for. Currently that's not an issue, as with delisted games from the Live Arcade, those who purchased the titles will still be able to re-download them by accessing their download history (which is tedious but does work). They also go on to state that any indie titles with online functionality, such as leaderboards and matchmaking servers, will continue to function after the shutdown of the indie games storefront, though I wouldn't expect to find much activity. The date for the shutdown was originally proposed to be as early as September 2016, but they didn't end up pulling the games from the storefront until early December 2017.
If you've ever played an indie title on your Xbox 360 before, you'll notice that you are required to have a persistent online connection in order for the game to boot up. From what I've been able to gather on it, the reason for this is due to the fact that online interactions are not rated by the ESRB, thus allowing developers to release titles without an official ratings board review which surely costs buckets of money. This makes me worry that they will never be able to run indie games without an Xbox Live connection, which means on that sad day when the 360 Live servers go down these games will die with it (until hackers inevitably bypass the online connection requirement at least). Perhaps at some point Microsoft could remove the online requirement for these games, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.
It was a bit sad seeing the XBLIG marketplace shutdown. While the service didn't have the greatest presence, known for containing lots of shovelware. It also didn't help that accessing the storefront was buried deep within the store menus, to the point that developer Mommy's Best Games even released a game to parody the situation, titled Game Type. If you were willing to dig within that crowded XBLIG storefront, there were some real gems to be found. While a good number of the better games received ports to other platforms (usually Steam), there are still a fair number of games that were exclusive to the platform and were potentially lost in time with the XBLIG storefront going down. If you feel like reading up on some of the titles that were available for the platform, feel free to peruse the Xbox Overview index of XBLIG game reviews as we've looked at quite a few games here. This site was originally founded in an effort to draw attention to some of the better games on the platform, so the majority of these reviews were written pre-XBLIG shutdown, but they're still worth a look nonetheless.
On another note, it looks like an XBLIG style section has popped up on the Xbox One, called the Creators Collection. This makes sense to launch at this time after the demise of indie games on their old console. There are only fourteen titles available on the platform as of this writing, but the fact that this is a storefront for independent developers to release their games on means that anybody who owns a dev center account can release games on the platform directly. Also reminiscent of XBLIG, the titles released to this section of the store will contain no achievements or gamerscore. This is definitely a welcome addition to the store but unfortunately looks like it's getting a lot of the same type of shovel-ware that scared consumers away from the indie games store.
Related Links
XBLIG Game Reviews - Xbox Overview
XBLIG Marketplace Shutdown - Indie Gamer Chick
Xbox Live Creators Program - Xbox.com
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