Microsoft: XBLA games rising quality leads to rising cost

Most gamers will probably notice that a good chunk of the high profile Xbox Live Arcade games are now around 1200 Microsoft Points, up from the previous usual 800 MSP. Xbox Live Arcade portfolio director Chris Charla states that the rise in quality XBLA games are the reason the game prices have gone up.

According to Charla, ”If you look at Live Arcade, and do the math, and look at the publicly available sales numbers, you can see that average prices on XBLA have crept up over the last few years, which has been an interesting trend because on some app markets there’s been a race to zero as fast as possible.”

Carla points out that while the games now cost $15 USD, the average Metascore for XBLA titles has jumped 12 points. ”Sometimes, when (developers) talk about Live Arcade they’re like, ‘We want to do a boxed quality game on Live Arcade’, and I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’ I can point at a bunch of 38 and 42 and 56 metacritic scoring boxed games, so it actually kind of pisses me off.”

Remember a few years ago when people were complaining about games like Dig Dug and Rally X being 400 MSP, and there weren’t any good games available on Arcade? With the increase in the size of the Xbox 360 hard drive and the size of XBLA games being loosened from 50MB to 100MB to 250MB to “no limit”, it’s not surprising games have gotten bigger, better and, yes, more expensive.