Indie Developers Band Together for 'Indie Winter Games Uprising' Promo on Xbox Live

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While Microsoft has executed multiple promotions for Xbox Live Arcade titles--the most recent being the XBLA Game Feast--independent developers have been largely ignored on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Beginning the first week of December, indie devs will execute their own promotion to shift some attention their own way.

The Indie Games Winter Uprising is a promotion that will attempt to fight back "against mediocrity and lameness" on the Indie Games channel, which is roughly comprised of 67% fart sound applications.

The promotion will offer new indie developed titles ranging from prices "as low as 80 to 400 Microsoft Points." A total of thirteen titles will be available during the promotion, from developers such as Ska Studios (The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai).

When the latest dashboard update hit the Xbox 360, the Indie Games channel was placed in the specialty shops section behind the Avatar Marketplace. The decision was criticized by some and defended by Microsoft. One week later, the Indie Games channel was returned to its original slot.

According to the developer of one of the promoted titles, Soulcaster 2, the idea for the promotion is to increase sales by getting more traffic to the Indie Games channel, resulting in more revenue for Microsoft in hopes that the company begins to promote that section of the Marketplace.

[Thanks for the tip, Jeff.]

Xav de Matos was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    November 15, 2010 9:30 AM

    Excellent idea. There are some gems in this indie section on Xbox Live... they seem hard to find though. The same titles always filter to the top when I look for titles and they are usually games which really don't interest me or I've been seeing up there for 6+ month on end. They need to work on their sorting and priority in the market place. I'm sure there is cool stuff there which isn't being seen.

    • reply
      November 15, 2010 10:15 AM

      diygamer.com does a good job of covering all the indie releases. I've found quite few keepers due to them.

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