XBL gets so much right, it's really astonishing. I only have to hear my friends' experience using their PS3 to understand how much infrastructure MS has managed to get right. At any time, I can see which of my friends are online, what game they're playing and what they're doing in it, or even what they're watching on NetFlix. It's so nice to be able to mess around in one game while my friends play other games, but we can still hang out and chat. And they can toss an invite at me while I'm playing a different game, I accept the invite and ZOOOOM off the console goes and a few moments later I've joined their session in their game, chatting the whole time. But there are some easy wins they haven't put in place, and I don't see why they're not already in place.
Anyway, these have all crossed my mind recently:
Friends Who've Played This Game: Under each Friend, the "Compare Games" option lets me see what games they've played, when they played them, and which ones we share. I want the converse of this feature; in Games Library, I want to be able to select any game and have it list which of my Friends have played it, and when they last played it. It's the same information, just sorted differently -- why isn't it there? It would be a huge help in organizing multiplayer or co-op sessions.
It would also follow that within any game, selecting an Achievement should also allow a list of Friends who have it, maybe sorted by date to show who unlocked it first. Or maybe showing who has it most recently would encourage messaging to get a clue on how it was unlocked.
Introductions: There's -no- function for introducing Friends to each other. I have two Friends who are the rarest of rare: JAPANESE 360 OWNERS. There are like 20 of them in all of Japan; all the rest of the units sold here are owned by dirty foreigners or being used as space heaters. Just the other night we had dinner together, and afterward they told me they'd like to add the other as a Friend. "OK, let me just... send... No, OK, maybe if we're all on at the same time, I'll make a Party and invite both of you... aw, nevermind, here have an old-fashioned EMAIL."
Recommendations: There's no means of recommending or gifting a downloadable game to another Friend. It seems like the former should be trivial to implement, just an XBL text message "Chronovore thinks you might like this game. Download Trial Version?" I'm remembering a Recommend to Friend link, possibly pre-NXE, but maybe I just dreamed it. Does anyone recall that feature?
Gifting: Already a feature in iTunes. The amount is subtracted from my account, the license is awarded to the target user, and a message is sent to them. Seriously, the weeks where a game goes on sale for half off, they could make bank from people who want to play with friends. "You don't have it? No problem, have this, it's only 400 spacebucks!"
Genius: Thinking about the recommendation feature and then iTunes' gifting, the Genius feature there also struck me as a good option for games. Not just a broad strokes genre tool, but based on the amount of data MS has on each GamerTag, looking at the overlap of games and the types of Achievements a player has unlocked, it can search for similar patterns and recommend games. Maybe if only 10% of a game's Achievements have been unlocked and it's been unplayed for weeks, the game can effectively be considered "unloved," and its influence would limit returns of similar games.
Which ones would you like to see? Anything other ideas I can add to the poll?
Poll
