To promote Indie games on Xbox Live Arcade, a group of independent game developers have taken matters into their own hands. They’re releasing an app called XBLIG Companion, which scours the RSS feed from XboxIndies.com. Users can then use the phone’s integration with Xbox 360 to buy and download the games to their console. Kudos to the developers for showing initiative, but with the way Microsoft has been treating the indie channel, it might be a better idea just to develop for Windows phone 7 directly.

Source: SlashGear.

According the Critic Aggregator Metacritic, Microsoft was the highest rated video game publisher in 2011, beating out Nintendo and Sony respectively. The software giant had 90+ critic scores of Forza 4 and Gears of War. However, most of their lead comes from XBLA games such as Iron Brigade and Joe Danger: Special Edition. Rounding out the top five were Nintendo, Sony Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and Square Enix. You can check out the full report here.

Source LazyGamer.

The latest Xbox live Update has done more than put more Axe ads on your Xbox 360. Kris Steele, creator of Hypership: Out of Control has discovered that the new interface has reduced the first day trial downloads of the Hypership sequel fall by over 50%. Anyone who goes on the new dashboard will only find indie games stashed under a tile called “game type” and new indie titles are not being shown in the same category as the official XBLA games or games on demand. Microsoft claims that the indie games section is still profitable, but with this kind of treatment, one has to wonder if their faith is waning.

Source: Gamasutra