Yesterday during its Gamefest conference in Seattle, Microsoft finally took the wraps off its business model for Xbox Live Community Games, which should enable aspiring developers to easily create and make money on their unique games. We caught up with newly promoted Chief Technical Officer of the Interactive Games Business, Chris Satchell, to dive deeper into the plan for the Community Games project, and we also discussed the future of Zune games.

GameDaily BIZ: What is the provision that makes it "up to 70%?" What determines how much a Community Games developer will actually receive?

Chris Satchell: As standard, you're in our catalogue, that's 70%. Now, we think there's going to be an awful lot of content, so there's a lot of things we're doing. We're putting the whole catalogue on Xbox.com, so you can do web searches, find urls and send them to your friends, and do the whole viral thing, just like you do with movies on the Internet. You can actually purchase games from Xbox.com and have them downloaded to your box... Not everyone wants to go to the webpage. Just like there's an XBLA store in the marketplace, there's going to be an Xbox Live Community Games store. On the front of that store, there's going to be slots reserved for the top games – like top downloaded games, best reviewed, or new arrivals. And those games – there are only about 6-10 slots – there at the front of the store... So let's say your game starts to get great downloads and now you're at the front of the store. That's where the percentage can change. We're promoting your game, you're getting promote real estate, and your downloads should go through the roof. Depending how well we're doing promoting your game through that storefront, we're going to take between 10 and 30 percent as a marketing fee.

BIZ: So you're saying games not in the storefront will be at 70% but storefront promoted titles could be around 40% to 60%, correct?

CS: Absolutely. The better you're doing, the more we'll take. As soon as you're out of that storefront, then you're back to 70% again. The game will spend most of its time at 70%, but if we're promoting you and you're getting more traffic, there will be a 10% to 30% marketing fee. It's similar to any kind of retail channel.

BIZ: In terms of pricing, the announcement said a game can be anywhere between 200 and 800 MS Points. Is there some sort of guideline you're giving to developers on how you feel they should be pricing content?
Pricing?

CS: Basically, it's just three price points we're letting them choose from, 200, 400 and 800. You pick one of those three price points. It's also good to point out that every game has a trial, so as a consumer you can always try before you buy... But as a creator, you can choose any one of those price points. It's completely your choice.

BIZ: In terms of the independent games movement, there are sites out there like Kongregate and Manifesto Games that have a similar push for aspiring developers. Was the Community Games project inspired by these at all, and do you think we'll see some of the same games, some cross-pollination on Community Games and these other sites?

CS: In terms of inspiration, we've been going at this for four years, so we've been planning this for a long time. And of course, we built a whole new programming environment and paradigm that made it much easier to build games and build across platforms. ... So unlike what those sites do, we put a whole programming language behind it as well, to make it not only easier to share your games or profit from your games, but also just to build them in the first place. In terms of starting at one place and going to another. You can with your concept, but for XBLC games, you have to build in XNA because that's the environment we have in the system. So you'd probably have to rebuild your game, like in Flash for Kongregate or native C++. The good news is, though, it's a very productive programming environment. I think what you'll see more of is just a lot of people start straight in XNA Game Studio to go right to the XBLC, because we have a great destination that's in the living room with 12 million [potential] customers. It's a super engaged community that's really hungry for games.

BIZ: In terms of the business model, Kongregate makes its games free to players and shares ad revenues with the game creators. Is that a path you considered for Community Games?

CS: That's something we could consider in the future. We picked something that we thought would best work for our consumers and developers, based on what we've seen in XBLA and other marketplaces. Of course, we can try different revenue streams. We wanted to start with this one because we know it's successful and it's the best way to get this rolling. Then we can look at future [business models] down the line. We're always expanding and updating our platform – you saw the big case of this at E3 with the new Xbox experience – so it's easy to add these things in the future.

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