Imports and improvements for the XBLA

With over 10 million downloads, XBox Live Arcade is really keeping people interested in their consoles. Allowing you to download your own bits of nostalgia and demo content adds to the replay factor of the console, but this certainly isn’t the end of the development process.

According to Greg Canessa, head of Microsoft’s XBLA, there are a bunch of ideas in the works, with the introduction of Fatal Fury Special for XBLA being the first of many.

To drum up more support in Asia for the XBox 360, they’re trying to get additional Japanese game devs to offer their games or make new ones for Japanese consumers to download. In addition to Yie Ar Kung Fu as an Asia-specific title, they’re hoping to get something along the lines of Shogi (Japanese chess, basically) as well as Q Entertainment‘s  Lumines Live as downloadable content.

There’s also been talk of an online “imports” section, where players can download untranslated Japanese games for them to try out. Quirky titles that normally wouldn’t see the light of day in Europe and America would thus be available for niche gamers who don’t mind not understanding what they’re doing if it means playing something they’ve always wanted to. In two words, “dating sims.”

Canessa also thinks that XNA will definitely be able to augment XBLA in the future once they can create and fully customize their own games for the 360. Since user-generated content is all the rage these days, it seems like a safe bet that things are looking up for XBLA’s future on the market.

With over 10 million downloads, XBox Live Arcade is really keeping people interested in their consoles. Allowing you to download your own bits of nostalgia and demo content adds to the replay factor of the console, but this certainly isn’t the end of the development process.

According to Greg Canessa, head of Microsoft’s XBLA, there are a bunch of ideas in the works, with the introduction of Fatal Fury Special for XBLA being the first of many.

To drum up more support in Asia for the XBox 360, they’re trying to get additional Japanese game devs to offer their games or make new ones for Japanese consumers to download. In addition to Yie Ar Kung Fu as an Asia-specific title, they’re hoping to get something along the lines of Shogi (Japanese chess, basically) as well as Q Entertainment‘s  Lumines Live as downloadable content.

There’s also been talk of an online “imports” section, where players can download untranslated Japanese games for them to try out. Quirky titles that normally wouldn’t see the light of day in Europe and America would thus be available for niche gamers who don’t mind not understanding what they’re doing if it means playing something they’ve always wanted to. In two words, “dating sims.”

Canessa also thinks that XNA will definitely be able to augment XBLA in the future once they can create and fully customize their own games for the 360. Since user-generated content is all the rage these days, it seems like a safe bet that things are looking up for XBLA’s future on the market.