XBLA dropped for Xbox One, all games lumped together

With the Xbox One, the Xbox Marketplace will no longer offer a distinction between retail, Arcade and Xbox Live Indie Games -- instead, all titles will be available under the same banner. Talking to Eurogamer, Microsoft's Phil Harrison explained that where the Xbox 360 offers separate channels for the different types of games on offer for the console, the Xbox One will instead bring them all together. "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," he noted. "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." Essentially, users will be able to search through all the available games for the Xbox One together rather than sifting through individual channels. Through this move, Harrison believes that Microsoft will "solve fantastically some of the challenges that independent developers face, particularly around discovery and connecting their game to an audience, by some of the platform features we have in the machine itself." When asked whether removing separate channels for indie titles will mean that some games won't be featured in the same way that they were on Xbox 360, Harrison answered that this would not be the case. "No, no, not at all. We don't give that up - we don't give up the ability to put a spotlight on the products that we think are going to be exciting to our user base," he said. "But in addition to that, what your friends are playing, what other people think is hot in your area, your country, your continent, will propagate up the most interesting and exciting games." He later reiterated that the Arcade and Indie tabs on the current Xbox Dashboard will not be part of the Xbox One Dashboard.