We caught up with Scott Austin, Microsoft’s director of digitally distributed games, to ask about the first six months of Community Games as part of the background to E202’s Creation Myths article, an in-depth look at the state of play on the Community Games channel we’ll be posting here on Monday. In the face of widespread disaffection among many developers about the sales figures their games were achieving, he presents Microsoft’s side of the story.

What's the Microsoft reaction to the first set of sales figures?
Our perspective is always test-learn-iterate, and I think what we’re doing here with XBCG is something that’s never been done before, so we didn’t try to predict what would happen. It was just an idea – “Hey, why don’t we empower every developer in the world to put out a game unfettered and unbeholden to the process that is kind of arduous at times for getting a game onto a console.” And let’s let any developer in the world do that and we’ll see what happens.

I think what’s fantastic is that we’ve enabled this in and of itself mind-bogglingly complex thing – and I’d love it to be simpler but nothing ever is – and we now have a toolset and distribution channel for everyday developers to talk to consumers like they never have before. We’ve got that built, we’ve created the pipeline and community, and crafted relationships and built awareness on the developers side, and now we get to put it in the hands of developers of players, so I’m excited by a number of statistics like the number of games we’ve got out there, the number of times a developer has come back to us and put out a second game – those kind of stats.

The reaction from certain elements of the development community and the gaming media was somewhat different. What's the feeling about that somewhat negative initial reaction?
We’re Microsoft. If we sneeze improperly people are going to mock us. I’m not so worried about the tone of what people say – some people love any opportunity to bash. Let’s forget the negative for a minute. What the industry is saying is they’re excited by the potential for community games and they want to see it do more – and I share in that belief that the potential is there. We now have a paradigm, a new business model that gives choice to consumers – and we’ll see which direction it goes in. There are things out there, directions we might be surprised by, like Rumble Massage or Remote Masseuse – I don’t know if you can call them games, but those are great examples of people taking this new thing and redefining it for us in ways we thought it’d never be defined as.

Microsoft originally said it would double its 30 per cent cut on sales for titles that it promoted, but in the event, didn’t. Why not?
I’m going to give you the ‘we don’t talk about our business deals’ answer.

One of the issues the figures brought to the fore was the presence of apps – did you expect this kind of product on the service, and are there future plans for distinguishing between them and games?
I think that the service we have out there now is too young to decide what, if any, changes we want to make to it. I think we’ve got a good concept, a good pipeline, a good relationship with developers, and we’re building awareness with consumers. I want to let that ecosystem exists and see what happens inside of it.

But it is hard to find them, and for consumers to distinguish between what’s there.
I think that NXE has done a fantastic job of exposing the depth and breadth of what’s on Xbox Live to our users. It provides a lot of great tools. Could we make it better? You can make anything better. But we’ve taken a great step forward with NXE in giving people access to that content and allowing them to become educated around that consumer experience.

What about the absence of Community Games from the front page of NXE?
We have many types of content on the Marketplace today, and it gets promoted at varying levels of frequency, so XBCG isn’t the only thing you could say that about. We think about what do consumers want the most, and then make it easier for them to find. The beautiful thing we have with NXE is we can change that experience dynamically, but the thing we’ll do with that is let the user settle into the new experience. Let them understand the new paradigm, then let us understand how users are using it. Then let’s figure out what tweaks we want to make – major tweaks, minor tweaks, whatever. You’ve seen very little change on our side on purpose – because anytime you change a user experience as completely as we did with NXE, and we’re at the point now where people are comfortable with it, and we’re analysing the good flows and the bad flows, and we’ll optimise that and change things in and out in the future.