Portal Denied XBLA Release
Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi said that the critically acclaimed title—awarded 2007 Game of the Year by the Shacknews staff and our readers—was held up by restrictions such as Xbox Live's recently increased 150 megabyte file size limit.
"We'd love to do that. Right now it's something we'd love to do. I'd love to sell Portal on Xbox Live," Lombardi told GamesIndustry. "[But] the platform holders aren't doing that right now. There's a size limit and all kinds of other things.
"We've asked them, we said we were open to it. So it's a decision for the platform holder and how they want to make the games available and how much bandwidth they want to [allow]," he added.
Despite the rejection, Lombardi noted that a downloadable Portal on consoles may yet be possible.
"I think it's a trade-off, we'll see it one day," the developer said. "It always happens once it's been proven and I think it's been proven now on Steam, so I'm sure it'll migrate back to the consoles just like everything else does."
Portal is currently available as part of Valve's mega-compilation The Orange Box (PC, PS3, X360), and available as a standalone PC title both in retail outlets and on Steam.
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Jackass1233
replyMS really needs to get rid of this arbitrary limit. I understand why they put it in at first, they don't want bloatware spamming xbox live and people having to waste hours downloading huge games that shouldn't be. But canning things like portal, or restricting the overall resolution of HD sprites for the SF2 HD remix (Although I know that wasnt the ONLY reason they reduced the quality of the sprites) is just stupid. Its really only hurting the gamers. Im sue people who want to play portal or other stuff like that have no problem downloading 500mb games (wtf, some demo's for games released are like 2 gigs, is 500megs really that huge of a deal).
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It's pretty stupid though. They want the 360 to be more than a gaming system, but they keep selling the system with a 20GB hard drive and no hard drive. It makes no sense. They need to put the 20 in the Arcade model and put the 120GB in the Premium model. Just dump the Elite. There's no reason for it really (and I have an Elite).
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I have two words:
price points.
Microsoft is trying to increase the numbers of consoles sold. Whereas a mid-point HD might appeal to all of us (meaning readers of this site), that doesn't mean that enough people will purchase it for it to be economically viable in Microsoft's eyes. I would think that one of the major selling points (especially in Microsoft's eyes) is that anyone who buys a 360 can play every arcade game available. This does one thing, surely.
It makes XBLA more viable to a specific demographic (those who buy 360s but not a lot of major releases, don't use the console to store any data).
You still have a good point though. I believe that as long as the no-HDD units are available, it is very unlikely that you will see large XBLA releases. I think it makes Microsoft a bit slower in adopting and implementing new ideas with the console. That's definitely a bad thing.
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SF2 HD remix was not changed in any way due to the file limit, which was lifted anyhow. They changed the art style a little in favor of being able to release the game sometime this year, as it was taking entirely too long painting in the older HD style. It was a streamlining of the production process, not a file size restriction.
