XBLA games required to work on smaller TVs

The process of getting a game on XBLA is somewhat mysterious. We’ve heard that there are all sorts of requirements which have to be met in order to appear on the service, such as twelve achievements totalling 200 gamerscore. OXM is supplying a couple more pieces to the puzzle in an article which promises an “inside” look at the digital publishing platform.

There isn’t too terribly much to go on, but a comment from Mark Morris, managing director at Introversion Software (makers of Darwinia+) does shed a bit more light on the standards Microsoft has for Arcade titles:

“One of the biggest challenges is that your game has got to be playable on a 14-inch CRT television. So you have to do all this visibility work in case someone is playing it on a composite cable through a TV, to make sure they can still read all of the text and tell exactly what’s going on.”

That’s comforting to know. While a lot of people have moved on to high-definition displays, there was that considerable uproar when Capcom made text in Dead Rising so small that it was unreadable on older televisions. The last thing I want when I buy a game is to bring it home and find out that I can’t play it because of insufficient hardware.

At the same time, it seems that  some of the requirements may be up for grabs. Filesize limitations for XBLA games have been steadily on the rise. Once as small as 50 Mb, it has increased sevenfold over the last two years to its current level of 350 Mb as larger games, such as the upcoming Portal: Still Alive, have required them.

[Via CVG]