On his popular blog Jamie Fristrom, who is the technical director of the Schizoid developer Torpex Games, revealed some insight into the behind the scenes working of getting a game on Xbox Live Arcade, the certification process and XNA. Here's a bit about what he has to say about the process of getting onto Xbox Live Arcade.[quote]To get an Xbox Live Arcade game approved, there's various stages and greenlight meetings you have to get through. First you've got to get somebody there excited enough to get it into a greenlight meeting in the first place. We showed a prototype to a manager from the XBLA team and he was excited enough to evangelize it.

The next stage is the "Concept Greenlight" - they regularly have a group get-together to review proposals and decide whether they want to pass on them or not. Apparently, at our greenlight, we were the only concept that had a prototype. So a prototype will definitely help you stand out. "Don't build it and they won't come." Our prototype, by the way, was only three man-months of work.

The next stage is a due diligence meeting. Here, they want to establish that you can actually execute, and finish the game before your launch window. Any red flags or concerns they have will be raised. For example, they wanted to know how long we could survive if the game slipped; they wanted to know if we had a test plan. For us, I think it helped that everybody on the team has an established track record.

And that's where we are now. Coming up later is the certification or TRC - the "technical requirements checklist" - all the console manufacturers do this. And games that have network play have much more elaborate requirements than ones that don't. It takes two weeks to get through cert - and if you fail, it resets. You have to take another two weeks.[/quote]I guess we can now better see why there was such issues with a game like Worms, who missed a few of it's release dates. Sure the Xbox Live Arcade team has been pushing that down our throat for awhile now, but I think it bears so much more weight coming from a vocal third party voice. It would be interesting to see what the average turn around time is for a game to go from failing certification to the developers fixing the issue to being back in the certification process. My guess is that first the developer will need a few weeks for fixing the game and then thoroughly testing it on their end before sending it back. Failing a certification would instantly push you back possibly a month or more for the next release date.