Kotaku's Luke Plunkett took the now infamous analysis of community games by GamerBytes two days ago, and made the assessment that XBLA community games "don't sell and don't make money." Well not to be a prick, but that would seem like a fairly obvious sentiment to anyone who has read the article. In fact, it's flat out crap journalism like this that has polarized those who read Kotaku. You either love them, or you hate them.
You can probably already guess which camp I'm in. Kotaku's pis poor fact checking, their lack of respect for bloggers with smaller readerships, and their use of aliases, has tarnished what was originally a nice newsblog. Unfortunately, Brian Crecente and his merry band of trigger-typing morons have nothing to offer readers in the form of self created content. Rather, Kotaku has turned into a blog that relies on it's tipsters to inspire articles that generate readership. And I use the term blog lightly, because like it or not, Kotaku has propelled to the level of aggregate readership that parallels IGN, GameSpot, & blog-like counterparts like Joystiq & Destructoid. Though technically these latter mentioned webs fit the blog look, their behind the scenes access to devs & their content literally take them out of the definition of a "blog."
I'm not bitter, but when I see the obvious the last thing I do is blog about it. Which brings me back to the topic at hand; community games that are made by gamers for gamers is a new realm. Often when breaking new ground or developing new trends, very few positives come from these avenues. In fact, when introducing new features such as community games; we'll most likely learn more lessons from what was done incorrectly.
For example, think of XBLA back with the original Xbox, there were few titles, and the purchasing of those games was a pain. Microsoft learned from this mistake and retooled XBLA for the 360, which I might now add is a success.
Are people really going to download titles like 360 Calculator? No. Will homebrew developers start to get a better idea of what it'll take to survive as a small time influence on the industry? Yes.
Right now, Microsoft is still trying to figure out how community games will be viable as a long term profitable business solution. Say what you want, there is a market for homebrew games on retail consoles. However, the method for it's delivery and the marketing behind it, is just something that Microsoft will have to figure out as time goes on.
It's just unfortunate that some journalists don't have the ability to read into what their writing about, rather than just typing up short sarcastic linear essay.
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