Remember that post I made earlier about Xbox Live Arcade being Microsoft's killer app? There's been a spate of other posts made recently over at GarageGames that back my theory up:

• How Much Money Can Your XBox360 Live Arcade Game Make?
• XNA Game Studio Express Doubters Get It Wrong
• How Much Money Can Indie Games Make?

To be fair, GarageGames is currently building a CodeWarrior-style developer's environment for XNA (the Xbox dev language) so they're not 100% unbiased, but I'm willing to drink their Kool-Aid if it means the democratization of game development.

Further, none other than Raph Koster delivered a major doom-and-gloom scenario at the Austin Game Conference (which I'm still annoyed I had to miss this year) that's reflective of the general doom-and-gloom scenario that Chris Weaver delivered to his game development class here at MIT in the Spring. Apparently the games industry is so hit-driven it's even worse than Hollywood – way worse than Hollywood, because there's little to no second or third wave of income, unlike the cinema-DVD-rental-cable series of income waves built into the movies. Theoretically, a system like Xbox Live Arcade could destory the 'shelf space crisis' built into the current distribution system and make it easier to deliver more 'long tail' properties like 2D side-scrollers (*cough*Castle Crashers*cough*). Keep your fingers crossed.