Ask any gamer why they don’t play more Xbox indie games, and the most common response is the lack of Achievements. While some gamers claim to resist Achievements' allure, for many they can add tremendous replay value to games. Achievements become a gamer’s history, a record of all the games they have played and their progress in them. That record is ubiquitous across all of Microsoft’s platforms, including retail Xbox 360 games, Xbox Live Arcade, and even select Windows Phone games — all of which contribute to your Gamerscore. All platforms that is, except Xbox Live Indie Games. And with Microsoft keeping silent on Achievement implementation in XBL Indie Games, we asked some indie developers for ideas on successfully working Achievements into the XBLIG landscape.

The most common idea is simply to enable Achievements for Xbox Live Indie Games at a flat Gamerscore rate across all games — say, a possible 100-point Gamerscore gain for every indie game. This would be consistent with Microsoft’s current structure where possible Gamerscore is consistent across all retail and Xbox Live Arcade games. But, as Cthulhu Saves the World developer Robert Boyd points out, there could be problems with that. “What's to stop developers from making games purely designed to raise someone's Gamerscore in an easy manner?” he asks. Achievements could be ripe for abuse as $1 indie games suddenly became an easy way to boost your Gamerscore.

Decimating points in Decimation X3.  

Matthew and Jason Doucette, the two-man team that makes up the Canadian-based Xona Games, have a solution. The Doucette brothers have long been advocates of Xbox Live Indie Games as a platform, where their titles like Score Rush and Decimation X3 have become among the top five rated in Japan. They suggest that Gamerscore payout should be tiered based on the game’s price. $5 games would award 100 points, $3 games 60 points, and $1 games 20 points.

Xona’s tiered Achievement concept addresses the key concerns surrounding a flat rate. Though Arcade games can release for $5, that's an increasingly rare occurrence compared to $10 and $15 games. The tiered system would more or less equalize the price-per-Achievement ratio, eliminating the possibility of abuse. On average, $10 would translate to 200 potential Gamerscore, whether that's from one XBLA game or various combinations of indie games.

Tiered achievements by price would also better reflect the difference in quality between $1 and $5 indie games. “Most games are priced at 80 MSP, and therefore game quality is akin to a $1 format,” Matthew Doucette explains, “What about $5 games and ‘$5 game’ quality? Consider being a developer who wants to make a great game in the $5 format instead, but is not capable of landing an XBLA contract, which typically runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you were such a developer, you would want XBLIG to treat your $5 games in a different league than $1 games.”

“If the quality, price, gameplay, and mileage expectations all increase, as well as development cost and time, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t the Gamerscore increase too?” Doucette adds.

Answers could be found in Game Room, perhaps the first time that statement has ever been made.

However, there may be a larger obstacle in implementing indie game Achievements than just price and quality. As far as your Xbox 360 is concerned, singular indie games don’t exist. Individual indie games don’t appear on your Xbox Live play history, and when a friend is playing one, the Dashboard notification simply states "indie game" rather than the specific game’s title. The problem goes deeper, as checking the system hard drive reveals a single file titled “Indie Games” with each game inside treated as DLC for that umbrella category. Enabling individual Achievements for each game, either through a flat rate or tiered method, would require a significant overhaul of the entire system. A much-needed and long overdue overhaul, to be sure, but not a very likely one.

All hope is not lost, though. Similar to Xbox Live Indie Games, Microsoft’s Game Room also treated individual games as DLC and still managed to work in Achievements. Rather than having Achievements for tasks in each game, Game Room awarded Gamerscore for doing tasks like decorating your personal arcade or playing a game for a set duration. Indie Games don’t have the interactive hub that Game Room does, but Achievements based on playing habits would be a natural fit. The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile and I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1 developer James Silva suggests taking the idea even further to promote community involvement.

“I'd personally love to get an Achievement for releasing an XBLIG game,” Silva says, “but it would actually do quite a easy, huge benefit to the platform to give people 5 points just for trying out an XBL indie game. You could do Achievements for rating games, trying games, buying games, even doing Creator's Club stuff like playtesting and peer reviewing. Make it happen!” (Ed Note: Turns out that's actually not too far-fetched!)

Cute Things Dying Violently, in which cute things do indeed die violently. 

Boyd, however, offered another great solution with his own spin on the Game Room system: “One possible solution would be to allow all XBLIG titles to include any number of 0-point (in-game) Achievements," he says. "This way, you could avoid potential abuse of the system from less scrupulous developers. However, at the same time, Microsoft could create a pseudo XBLIG "game" with 1000 points worth of Achievements for XBLIG as a whole.”

Game Room itself allowed each game to award medals akin to Boyd’s 0-point Achievements. Earning a certain number of those medals would then reward players with an Achievement for Game Room. Microsoft has already proven that such an Achievement structure can work, it’s just a matter of the slight modifications to implement it.

After three years of indie games without Achievements, among other basic requested features, it’s understandable that developers’ hopes have become closely guarded by caution. “Absent other fixes (like increasing XBLIG's visibility on the Dashboard, improving the Dashboard's quality filters, and better advertisement/marketing), Achievements could boost sales," Cute Things Dying Violently developer Alex Jordan says. "Proper inclusion of good Achievements could change XBLIG titles from disposable 80 MSP novelty items into serious time investments, as players would play games longer to unlock their points and hopefully add some much needed longevity to the market.”

Perhaps it is too late to make these vital changes for indie games on the Xbox 360. But with rumors of the next Xbox bubbling on the horizon, Microsoft has a prime opportunity to finally get it right.

Indieverse is OXM's weekly column covering one of the Xbox's most overlooked areas -- Xbox Live Indie Games. You can check out the Indieverse archive here.