Microsoft Was Afraid XBLA Would Destroy Console Market, Says Creator

Xbox Live Arcade creator Greg Canessa has said that executives at Microsoft were afraid his idea would be the "harbinger of death" for the console business before it came to fruition.

He added that only some at the company understood what Xbox Live Arcade was about, and that the vastly different experience it did offer would not lead to the end of the gaming console market, in an interview with IGN.

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"That was key to the vision behind Xbox Live Arcade was shoring up the wall of what it was and what it wasn't," he said. Canessa talked about the varied wants from many within Microsoft and among the development community, and how they viewed the spawning of a console-based digital distribution system as a place to do all sorts of stuff. "Which comes back to this concept of curation, was us having a specific vision for what this service was and wasn't: indie games, casual games, retro games, games that otherwise didn't have a voice. In some ways, it was the democratisation of console gaming."

Canessa said that a lot of people at the Redmond software giant had problems with their limited vision, and that had partly to do with Microsoft's new presence in the console market. "We were in the process of building a platform for the future ...we were in the business of consoles for only a few years. At that time, there was a fear if we didn't do anything a large publisher wanted us to do, we would be pissing them off and they'd go away.

"There was a legitimate fear that Xbox Live Arcade was going to cannibalise retail sales and completely destroy the console industry. That was actually a quote I got from one of the internal folks."

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Xbox Live Arcade wasn't envisioned a place for old games that would be ported, Canessa confirms, but one with a lot of original content. They tried to manage expectations externally and internally that this was for certain types of games and not for other games, to assume them $5-$10 (approx. Rs. 340 - Rs. 680) games wouldn't crash the established model of console video game publishing.