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I love this story - it shows the Long Tail that is out there for gaming. Even though we have monster titles like the Halo franchise and the latest hit, Gears of War, there is still a big market for home brew classic games. This article proves the point as four 20 year old guys from Capitol Hill have created one of the hits for XBOX 360.
Small Arms was released on November 20th and is a shoot 'em up that debuted at the number 4 spot on XBOX Live (above the pretty popular Madden franchise!). I'm delighted for the guys who created it but also for the business model that it proves out that user generated content isn't constrained to blogs and that the Long Tail that Chris Anderson talks about is alive and well in the gaming world, despite the massive marketing campaigns behind consoles like XBOX, PS3 and Wii. I honestly don't know if the same capability is available for Wii and PS3 but helping to build new businesses is one of the great things about the Live community. It'll be interesting to see how Zune takes advantages of this same community. With the games it will be interesting to watch the Web 2.0 fast release affect impact games like Halo which is going in to public beta for Halo 3 soon.
Link to Software Notebook: Small firm gets big results with 'Small Arms'