Originally Published March 5, 2020
The origins of Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) goes back as far as 2006, one year after the system's launch, when Microsoft reached out to developers to make them aware of the upcoming indie games program. Microsoft introduced the XNA Framework, a tool that aimed to simplify game programming and make it easier to realize your creations. In late November 2008, the indie games storefront debuted as "Xbox Live Community Games" and was later renamed to XBLIG.
While I never had first-hand experience using the XNA Development tools, which allowed you to program in either C# or Visual Basic .NET. While I never had first-hand experience using XNA, I've read from several developers that the platform was intuitive and made designing quick and simple. Support for the XNA Development tools would be discontinued in 2013 and the service would not carry over to the Xbox One. The Microsoft Indie Outreach program would eventually be replaced with the ID@Xbox initiative, which is still active today.
There were well over 3,000 titles released by the time XBLIG wrapped up, an impressive number even if well over half of those titles are crap. This massive amount of games is one of the things that made it so hard for the good games to stand out, as they would tend to get buried under heaps of garbage and would require some digging to find. Of course, Microsoft's placement of the XBLIG storefront made matters worse and by even by the last update you still had to scroll through several layers of menu to find it. Microsoft offered up an awesome service with XBLIG but in the long run didn't do enough to really help it succeed.
If you were releasing a game onto the XBLIG service, you had a number of things working against your game finding success. In addition to a store crowded with sub-par games and a storefront that's a bit tough to find, none of the titles sold on XBLIG were allowed to contain any achievements or gamerscore. Achievements took off in a big way during the Xbox 360 era and there's no doubt one of the several reasons these games didn't get much play is due to the lack of them.
There were several limits when releasing a game on XBLIG when compared to your standard Xbox Live Arcade game. Developers could sell their games for 3 different price ranges: 80, 240 or 400 Microsoft points, which equals out to $1, $2.50 or $5. The titles priced at $1 were obviously the most tempting, but there were also the most duds at this price range. When XBLIG first launched, a strict 150 MB file-size limit was imposed, but was later upgraded to 500 MB. Leaderboards and online play weren't officially supported by Microsoft, but there were some clever developers that managed to get around this and included these features in their games using workarounds
In conclusion, XBLIG was a great idea and helped spur the indie games movement on home consoles, but was filled with a ton of potential that was never fully realized. Despite the numerous issues with XBLIG, there were still some awesome titles released that were definitely worth playing. There was an excellent write-up back in March 2011 on Gamasutra, which talks about and interviews several of the more prominent developers for the XBLIG platform. It's a good read and worth a look if you're interested in hearing first-hand accounts from some of the developers.
Related Links:
XBLIG - Xbox Overview
The Shutdown of XBLIG - Xbox Overview
ID@Xbox - Xbox
Xbox Live Creators Program - Xbox
XNA Development - Official Site
XBLIG Developers at a Crossroads - Gamasutra
XBLIG - Wikipedia
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