It seems like a lot of really fun single player games, especially two stick shooters, on Xbox Live Indie Games don't have online high score leaderboards. I'm not a game developer myself but it seems like this stems from there not being a uniform way of adding them to a game, and because developer have to host their own systems to maintain any leaderboards they might want to support.  So, in a lot of cases they get left out.

I realize it is not the same as automatic leaderboards, but would anyone be interested in having web based leaderboards for Indie Games?  I've been looking at it a little and it seems like it would be fairly simple to setup a section on XBLIG Ratings where people can submit their high scores with a photo or video. I'm thinking similar to how Score Hero does high scores for each Guitar Hero and Rock Band song.  You just pick the game, mode, difficulty, etc. and then specify your score with the proof. 

Let me know if that sounds like something you would be interested and I'll see about getting it setup. However, if you don't think you would use it let me know that too so I can focus my attention on other aspects of the site.

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Xbox Live Arcade & Indie Game Ratings

I'd be up for it. It is an idea with a lot of potential for tournaments, contests, and would even be good for the XBLIG Sessions. Nothing like a little (friendly) competition during the sessions! I hope others feel the same... :)

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ExL Studios
Blog

I think the only problem is that unless you integrate with the developers to create some sort of code as a hash of the score and the user's gamertag or something, it's too easy to cheat. If you just let people enter scores, they might just make stuff up. I think the game Lines did the web scoreboard using a technique like what I mentioned so you may want to get in touch with that developer and see about expanding that into something other developers can do.

But ultimately I fear the two main problems are:

1) Laziness. I doubt I would be inclined to take some code and enter it into a website to compete in the leaderboards, knowing it's not visible in the game.
2) Dishonesty if people can just enter arbitrary scores.

But if you can get past 2 (using the hash approach) and don't care about 1, I say go for it.

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Nick Gravelyn
Super Gravelyn Bros

#1 is a concern of mine as well. That is why I thought I'd post here and see if people would be interested.

For #2, I was thinking something like how Score Hero does their system where you have to include a photo or video of the score. It is an issue though that I'm open to more suggestions on.

I'll see if I can hunt down that developer and see how his panned out.

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Xbox Live Arcade & Indie Game Ratings

Its a cool idea in theory, but at the end of the day it would be a waste of time as only a handful of people would bother.  Plus, website leaderboards are a bit archaic.

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