Where the UCC?

Picture this, it was 2005 a large black box sat under my telly, it had provided me with hours of entertainment, then I heard there was to be an even better white box!  For months I gathered as much information as I could about the Xbox 360, I stayed up till all hours browsing for any snippets as to what this new machine could do.  All was good.  Come August I stopped smoking and placed a pre-order for the wonder machine, but only on the premise that i didn’t smoke again, to pay for it (still off the fags incidentally).  Come launch day in December I took my 360 home, all was good.

Now during my info gathering months I came across a speech made by someone at Microsoft who was bigging up the 360 when he told of this wondrous new feature User Created Content, UCC.  With UCC apparently you could design a new pair of trainers, a t-shirt, logos etc and you could then sell them on to other 360 users for them to use in game and for you to make some handy MS points.  Being slightly arty I thought this sounded brilliant, I could knock out some quick designs and make some points out of it.  All was good.

Here we are now more than two years after the 360 launched and my UCC is entirely non-existent.  Yup, it never really transpired.  Well I say never really but it would be unfair to dismiss Forzas’ editing system and the auction house, but it was all in game money not the much coveted MS points.  What went wrong?  I guess that developers either couldn’t or wouldn’t include it in their games, a great shame really ’cause it would have funded my arcade habit.  All was less than impressive.

Now look at the Wii, the Mii contest channel and even everybody votes is a step in the right direction.  The Miis’ especially are UCC at its’ most basic but oh so addictive level.  So far my greatest rank is level 9.  So come on Mr Gates, get the UCC project back online.  Oh wait a minute, if people earned MS points through stuff they created Microsoft wouldn’t rake in as much money!  The penny finally drops!  All is a bit shitty.