Joystiq has the longest interview I have ever seen up on their site, and it is with Chris Early, Studio Manager for Microsoft Casual Games Group.
It goes over the success of Geometry Wars, and how the whole Xbox Live Arcade came to be. Very interesting if you can sit through it until the end. One of the comments on the article is “can we have this in audio”, and I totally agree that for an interview this long…text does not do it justice.
Here is just one paragraph of a multiparagraph answer given by Chris Early to one of Joystiq’s multiparagraph questions/comments:
CE: Xbox Live Arcade is an area that started with Xbox One as a… There was an experiment that was done on Xbox One. And what we really did was start to take a look at some of the things that worked with Live and some of the things that worked in the web space for a long time and try to put a face on it that made it more relevant. For example, leader boards have been important for years. Even in the arcades you talk about, it was great to see who the top 10 were. But you know what? Maybe you got there but I never did. In the cases where I could see where I was, maybe I was 10,000th or 2,000th or wherever it was on those lists. But what’s important to me is how I rate against my friends–people I know.