The Latest on Xbox Live Arcade

While much of the hype surrounding the "next-gen" war has been focusing on spiffy new graphical tricks, Microsoft hasn't been concentrating all of its resources on a single front. By attracting (and converting) the casual gamer, Live Arcade titles not only provide a secondary revenue stream to the company but their mere existence serves as yet another point in Microsoft's favor when consumers are debating forking over their earnings for the Xbox 360.

Though the service got off to something of a rough start on the original Xbox, Live Arcade really hit its stride when the 360 launched thanks to a combination of dashboard integration and a killer app in the form of Geometry Wars. In an odd revelation, many core gamers listed Geometry Wars as one of the "must play" launch titles. Not a small feat for a game that was originally conceived in a programmer's spare time.

"When we launched [on the Xbox 360], Xbox Live Arcade was so successful, that even we had underestimated the level of success." Greg Canessa, group manager, Xbox Live Arcade. "Geometry Wars is our Halo."

Geometry Wars Geometry Wars

While Geometry Wars may be the biggest selling title on Xbox Live Arcade, it's not the fastest selling. That honor falls to a little card game known as UNO. Extremely faithful to the original game and sporting a flexible rule set (so you can play just the way Grandma taught you), UNO sold more than 100,000 copies in two weeks. Those are numbers that any publisher on any platform would love to have.

"The title has completely blown the doors off everything. The ratio of downloads to purchases is more than 50 percent," said Canessa.

Either with a successful sales history, one of the key complaints voiced about the system is the irregular release schedule. Over the past few months, content has appeared sporadically and at random, making it difficult to know when new games were coming out. At a preview event in San Francisco this week, Microsoft announced that the uncertainty was coming to an end with its new "Arcade Wednesdays" initiative. Wednesday is now the official "ship date" for all new Xbox Live Arcade titles, so gamers can expect a more predictable line of releases.