The end of Xbox Live Arcade

Microsoft is abolishing the Xbox Live Arcade and Indie game sections for the Xbox One’s new marketplace, Phil Harrison has revealed.

Speaking toEurogamer, the Microsoft EMEA corporate VP said that the Xbox Live Arcade and indie channels were being ditched in favour of a marketplace that did not discriminate against game type.

Harrison referred to the previous method of using specific indie game sections as using discrete silos”. Discoverability of these games will now be centred around other features such as friend recommendations.

In the past we had retail games which came on disc, we had Xbox Live Arcade and we had Indie Games, and they had their own discrete channels or discrete silos,” said Harrison.

With Xbox One and the new marketplace, they’re games. We don’t make a distinction between whether a game is a 50-hour RPG epic or whether it is a puzzle game or whether it is something that fits halfway between the two.”

Sister site Develop has more on this story.