Team 17: XBLA publishing is much harder now

Team 17's Martyn Brown believes the barriers to self-publishing on Xbox Live Arcade are becoming more difficult to break through. The studio director tells GI.biz that it's "massively" harder to get games on XBLA now, saying that there just aren't "many gaps in the portfolio" and the top sellers are mostly established IPs -- like his company's Worms games.

Brown believes that new developers without established connections need to make titles that cater to the platforms. He expresses that Sony "tends to like the new stuff" that isn't necessarily mass market, while with Microsoft "you're really going for the commercial mass market audience." The takeaway from this is that as digital distribution goes from being the new frontier to becoming the norm, it's going to have similar issues as current brick-and-mortar retailers.