XBLA prices slowly rising, says Microsoft

While the majority of XBLA games are still in the 800-point-and-under bracket, XBLA's Portfolio Director Chris Charla admits that the number of over-1,200-point titles in the service's library has been steadily increasing. During an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Charla said that XBLA's pricing trends are "a little bit of the opposite" of what one might normally see in an app-store ecosystem, where historically, pricing structures have entered "a race to zero as fast as possible."

So far, 2011 has seen 20 1,200-plus games land on XBLA. In 2010, 27 of the 85 games released for the service cost 1,200 points or more, an 8 percent increase over 2009, during which 21 out of 86 titles hit that price point. Charla attributes the gradual pricing increase to an increase in the number of quality titles on the platform: "I think the games that we're shipping -- a Limbo or a Castle Crashers -- are as good as anything on the market." He went on to say that while it's "really gratifying" to know that gamers are willing to pay a "premium" for digital content, it is the market that decides what direction prices will go.