Live Arcade could have had Portal

[Queasy]

Link

GamesIndustry.biz has learnt that Valve asked Microsoft if it was possible to place its award-winning Orange Box title, Portal, on Xbox Live Arcade for download, but that it was rejected.

"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," said Doug Lombardi, marketing director at Valve. "[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]."

But Lombardi did hint that something might be possible in the future: "I think it's a trade-off, we'll see it one day.

"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 was one of five titles available as part of last year's acclaimed Orange Box release, and won three awards - including Game of the Year - at this year's GDC event in San Francisco.

Microsoft increased the size limit for Xbox Live Arcade titles last March to 150MB, up from its previous limit of 50MB.

This seems odd in light of Xbox Originals and upcoming games like the Penny Arcade "My title is ridiculously long game" that are well beyond the XBLA size limit.

 

[MikeyLSU]

and this is why everyone was pissed at the crappy non HDD version of the 360 at launch.

All the fanboys kept saying it wouldn't change anything as all games would still use the HDD and it wouldn't affect anything.

Well, if every system had a HDD, this woudln't be a problem.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: MikeyLSU
and this is why everyone was pissed at the crappy non HDD version of the 360 at launch.

All the fanboys kept saying it wouldn't change anything as all games would still use the HDD and it wouldn't affect anything.

Well, if every system had a HDD, this woudln't be a problem.

Your theory is wrong, because it fails to explain why they've got Xbox Live Original games that clearly exceed the size limits of the memory cards.

 

[Queasy]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: MikeyLSU
and this is why everyone was pissed at the crappy non HDD version of the 360 at launch.

All the fanboys kept saying it wouldn't change anything as all games would still use the HDD and it wouldn't affect anything.

Well, if every system had a HDD, this woudln't be a problem.

Your theory is wrong, because it fails to explain why they've got Xbox Live Original games that clearly exceed the size limits of the memory cards.

Right, this falls more in line with just a bone-headed decision by MS Xbox than anything to do with a non-HDD 360 Arcade version. They've known they were going to do Xbox Originals for a while. They've known they were going to do the Penny Arcade game that will exceed the Live Arcade limit for a while now. Don't really know why they would turn down Portal.

 

[Thraxen]

They may just treat new games differently than BC games. You do have to question whether or not decisions like this would go down differently if Core systems didn't exist. I mean, you guys are claiming that's not the reason, but do you have a logic alternative?

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: Thraxen
They may just treat new games differently than BC games. You do have to question whether or not decisions like this would go down differently if Core systems didn't exist. I mean, you guys are claiming that's not the reason, but do you have a logic alternative?

Sure. There are two warring factions within Microsoft: the folks who want to move to full-on downloadable games, and the people who think they're ahead of their time and consumers aren't ready for full downloadable games yet. The former group got Xbox Live Originals as a trial run for their concept, but the latter is still running the show.

Simplistic answers that don't take into account corporate politics are silly.

 

[mugs]

I saw Portal selling for $20 (PC) at Target... it's a great little game, but it's so short that I don't think it's worth that much.

 

[Queasy]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: Thraxen
They may just treat new games differently than BC games. You do have to question whether or not decisions like this would go down differently if Core systems didn't exist. I mean, you guys are claiming that's not the reason, but do you have a logic alternative?

Sure. There are two warring factions within Microsoft: the folks who want to move to full-on downloadable games, and the people who think they're ahead of their time and consumers aren't ready for full downloadable games yet. The former group got Xbox Live Originals as a trial run for their concept, but the latter is still running the show.

Simplistic answers that don't take into account corporate politics are silly.

That or Valve and MS couldn't agree on revenue sharing. There are any number of possibilities. The lack of a HDD on one version of the 360 doesn't seem like the culprit in keeping Portal from being a downloadable game over Live given that they have released demos that are greater than 1GB, they are selling Xbox Original games that eat up 6GBs of space, additional content for retail games that take up multiple GBs, and they are selling movie and TV shows that take up multiple GBs.

 

[Thraxen]

Originally posted by: Queasy
That or Valve and MS couldn't agree on revenue sharing. There are any number of possibilities. The lack of a HDD on one version of the 360 doesn't seem like the culprit in keeping Portal from being a downloadable game over Live given that they have released demos that are greater than 1GB, they are selling Xbox Original games that eat up 6GBs of space, additional content for retail games that take up multiple GBs, and they are selling movie and TV shows that take up multiple GBs.

Yet they still have size limits for XBLA games... which is tied to the Core systems. I don't think the Original games are good counter-examples anyway as even in disc format they have always been tied to use of a HDD. That's not the case with XBLA games. Anyway, apparently size was indeed given as one of the reasons along with other "unnamed" reasons. The unnamed reasons could certainly be the profit sharing or some other factor listed here. I just think the Core/Arcade are mistakes and they continue to factor into decisions to this day.

 

[Queasy]

Originally posted by: Thraxen

Originally posted by: Queasy
That or Valve and MS couldn't agree on revenue sharing. There are any number of possibilities. The lack of a HDD on one version of the 360 doesn't seem like the culprit in keeping Portal from being a downloadable game over Live given that they have released demos that are greater than 1GB, they are selling Xbox Original games that eat up 6GBs of space, additional content for retail games that take up multiple GBs, and they are selling movie and TV shows that take up multiple GBs.

Yet they still have size limits for XBLA games... which is tied to the Core systems. I don't think the Original games are good counter-examples anyway as even in disc frormat they have always been tied to use of a HDD. That's not the case with XBLA games. Anyway, apparently size was indeed given as one of the reasons along with other "unnamed" reasons. The unnamed reasons could certainly be the profit sharing or some other factor listed here. I just think the Core/Arcade was/is a mistake and they continue to factor into decisions to this day.

Then what about the upcoming Penny Arcade game? That is clearly going to exceed the size limit of XBLA games yet they are distributing it through XBLA.

I'm not going to disagree with you that the Core/Arcade was a mistake. I just don't think it factored heavily (if at all) into Portal not being distributed digitially over Live.

 

[Thraxen]

The article mentions bandwidth directly. So clearly size played a role in one form or another. The examples you gave about movies, Xbox Originals, demos, and some DLC show that bandwidth hasn't been too much of a concern in the past for Live content. I think the quote in the article is just a nice way of saying, "MS told us our game was too big for XBLA". I could be wrong, but your own examples would seem to support my suspicion as much as your own.

 

[randay]

clearly this is payback for some asanine comment gabe newell must have made.