you guys need to come on the show dude to talk about that. it’d be great to get the word to my listeners from the people behind it.

Even this X marks the spot thing is more of a distributed partnership with other sites instead of a strict centralization of the competition at xbox.com. It would have been better if they would have partnered with sites like ours to do it though… that would have been pretty sweet… scouring sites like Unscripted, 360voice, GTR, Mygamercard.net, thexboxdomain, etc.

Just like XNA creators club is a crowd-sourcing approach to video game development, i can imagine them focusing their Xbox community development on a distributed model as well… The fact that Microsoft gives developers an API to Xbox Live puts them so far ahead of the competition at this point when it comes to community. Now they just have to take it to that next level… I am confident they are thinking about how to do it.

When it comes down to it, gamers don’t want a discount card that gets them 5% off at Borders… they want their name in lights. They want to be at the top of a leaderboard. They want to beat someone in a fair game, and win prizes or recognition for doing so… and they want to have a change to experience that whether they have a gamerscore of 10 or 10,000+. So we hope the Old Spice challenges at 360voice enable that by making it a personalized experience you can control.

the way it’s set up between friends and having gamers initiate the challenges was a great idea.

There was a recent meeting of the minds and I think someone over there is getting some balls rolling… because we have felt a new drive to really start giving out the tools to let the community expand.

I agree with what you said, Peter Moore left and the community events have kind of fizzled or suffered from after his departure. I think Peter really valued the community and now whomever has took over has really neglected the xbox community of late.

Xbox Diamond Card is nothing but wasted plastic/paper.
The whole community thing just is not as important as it once was to the people at MS.

Actually the Old Spice challenge will be hosted by us, but from Old Spice’s perspective it is the second coming of their initial challenge with a bigger focus on community and participation. Instead of just competing against yourself, you can compete against your friends… and there isn’t a point limit… you just have to beat them. And the best part is if you win once, you can play again. The challenges will be available for many months with new prizes each week. And the prizes are much cooler this time around as well.

Also with game-saving and cheating, in our challenges, you choose who you want to compete against, so you can put together challenges with like minded people… ensuring that your challenge is with people that are fair, honest gamers.

Part of the reason Old Spice came to a community site is that we can turn these projects around a lot faster than a big company like Microsoft. What would take MS 6-9 months to plan, coordinate and develop out, we can get up and running in 1 or 2 months… so that is really attractive. If this thing is a success, I can imagine other advertisers are going to be looking to communities to facilitate capabilities that MS themselves do not provide.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see MS pushing this sort of stuff deeper into the community because there are so many more of us than just them. That means more people to develop cool features and run competitions, give away more prizes, and create more participation. I remember that recently my360stats.com was used by AceyBongos (MS Euro community manager) to host a gamerscore challenge as well. Just like gamercards, why would Microsoft run this stuff if the community is more than willing to take it on and innovate with it?

So I hope you follow (and participate in) what we are doing at 360voice! Watch for the prize announcements shortly, it should be fun… and a challenge for us to keep the site running