Note: I think this post may be interesting to anyone creating, investing in, or distributing games (regardless of whether or not they are Xbox Live Arcade games.) However, I needed to ramble through some seemingly tangential stuff to make my point. Please bear with me. :-)

XBLA portfolio management is a complex thing… I’m one part cat-herder, one part traffic cop, one part talent scout, and one part “quality control.” (The latter part is especially tricky… who wants to be the guy who turned down Katamari because “the art was weak”, or one of the eight publishers who turned down Harry Potter because “the writing could use polish.”) I approach these roles with a healthy dose of humility (and even anxiety), knowing that at any moment I could become “the moron who turned down [fill in the blank].” Unfortunately, the longer I hold this position, the more likely that becomes!

Trying not to be a moron

So I’ve put systems in place to hopefully help reduce the risk of my own tastes (or lack of vision) from polluting the portfolio. I can’t really discuss the details, but they include a sort of “wisdom of crowds” feedback loop, in which indie submissions are screened and rated by a group of my colleagues within Microsoft (who are asked NOT to discuss the submissions with each other before rating them — mainly to avoid group-think.) The wisdom of crowds can make my forecasts more accurate, and it can help compensate for any subconscious biases I have. Unfortunately, what I don’t believe it can do is help me identify future mega-hits (i.e. “the next Geo Wars“.)

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Via Kim, news that Microsoft has unveiled a relatively progressive policy on the use of our video game IP for non-commercial purposes. I’m glad to see us moving in this direction, though I hope that in the future, we’ll re-evaluate the restrictions on fan fiction (in particular).

An unknown EA employee has allegedly been scrubbing EA’s wikipedia entry of anything deemed negative. The wikipedia community has already restored all the scrubbed content… and added an entire paragraph about the scrubbing itself.

Kongregate raised $5M from VC Greylock. Cash will be used in part to fund exclusive indie games. Here’s an interview with Jim, the founder (and a friend of mine from Pogo.) Grats, Jim!

Half the blogs I frequent have already linked to this interview with Jonathan Blow, but I only found the time to read it now (as it’s extremely long.) Now I know why it received so many links — a fascinating look into the mind of a very creative designer. Check it out.

MTV Networks now claims it will spend $500M on videogames over the next two years.

BioShock will sim-ship on Steam and at retail. Another notch in Valve’s belt.

Mass Effect is looking so sweet! (RPG fans, find a 15 minute preview video here.)

EA gobbles up the exclusive worldwide rights to video games based on Hasbro products like Monopoly, Scrabble, Nerf, etc. And Hasbro will be able to make toys based on EA properties (not too many possibilities immediately spring to mind.)

The GameTap ‘Read’ section has launched, and features several high-profile journalists from GameSpot, IGN, Ziff Davis and more. SimonC points out that this makes GameTap one of the larger editorial sites out there.

Warhawk will be released simultaneously on the PlayStation Store for $40 and in retail for $60 (bundled with a manual and bluetooth headset.) Even with the headset bundle, I’m surprised that retailers are OK with this. I don’t intend this to be a snide comment, but: perhaps PSN penetration is so poor that retailers don’t currently consider it a threat?

EA’s stake in Ubisoft has doubled to 25% of voting shares. The Guillemot family owns less than EA, at 13.4% percent of the company, and 19.2% percent of its votes. Don’t know when EA will finally gobble up Ubi, but I’d be willing to bet that there’s also a few casual game companies on their radar (I’ll refrain from saying which). Wave of acquisitions, here we come.

This article is about a random ARG of little interest to me. What caught my attention was the sentence: “there have been several game-jacking and/or unofficial fan sites.” Not something I’ve thought about before. What happens when users attempt to inject their own content into an ongoing ARG? Do ARG creators call them out (and risk weakening the illusion of reality around their games?) Or do they attempt to absorb and incorporate the most creative “game-jacking” attempts (which would inevitably encourage more of them, and which might complicate or even destroy various major iniatives of the ARG makers themselves?)

If you’ve ever played Pokemon, this comic is hysterical. :-)

Gamasutra tells the history of Activision. You won’t learn too many lessons (aside from the hopefully obvious ones like “don’t piss off your key employees” and “floods of bad content jeopardize entire ecosystems”) but I enjoyed this anyway.

A great article by Kim addressing the impact of free games that are created by advertisers like Barbie/Mattel and distributed with little or no direct monetization in mind (beyond helping to sell physical product.) Rich Hilleman (of EA) alluded to the same phenomenon during one of my GDC panels when he said Kellogg is our competition.

WoW is up to 9M paying subs. Tremendous.

I occasionally resolve to pay less attention to Second Life, only to be sucked back in. The latest: Linden Labs has banned gambling. (By most accounts, gambling has represented a large percentage of all economic activity in SL.) A wise friend of mine noted that effective enforcement mechanisms remain unclear, and even with meaningful enforcement, you’re likely to see the real-world equivalent of basement casinos spring up — only in more interesting ways! Relatedly, Ginko Financial, a SL virtual bank, is “in crisis” because customers panicked and attempted to withdraw more funds than the bank had available, forcing it to cap withdrawals. Law & economics professors, have fun with that one! And lastly, Chris Anderson writes about his decision to abandon SL and quotes some very interesting counter-arguments from Wagner James Au. My favorite Anderson quote:

My feeling is that if you’re going to evoke real world conceits such as “places” that you “go to”, then you’ve got to deal with real world expectations of those places. We don’t like like empty buildings in RL; why should be more tolerant of them in SL?

Favorite Au quote:

My Second Life blog is only one among several high-profile SL-centric blogs. Weblogs Inc.’s secondlifeinsider.com, 3pointd.com, and secondlifeherald.com are also in the Technorati Top 5000; Linden Lab’s official SL blog is in the top 1500. (That’s not even mentioning influential blogs like Boing Boing and Terra Nova which often blog about SL activity and content, or celeb bloggers like Larry Lessig and Joi Ito, who visit SL semi-regularly and write about it.) Then there’s the vast ecosystem of SL blogs, 3rd party sites and bulletin boards, podcasts, social network groups, and machinima videos which number in the thousands. (YouTube alone has 5000+ videos tagged with “Second Life”; the top 20 have been viewed over 3 million times.) This is the network of activity you’re promoting your appearance to, not just the 40,000 Residents who happen to be in-world at any given time.