Ever since its inception, XBLA has grown stronger and stronger each year with some fantastic little titles like Braid, Geometry Wars, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and many, many more. But with all these fantastic games there is a dark shadow that lingers around it -- its certification and development process. Although a pain in the ass, it doesn’t really effect big publishers such as Capcom, EA, and Ubisoft since they are used to the rigorous tests, but what about the small, independent developers trying to make a name for themselves?

We recently spoke to Daniel Jones, Managing Director of Binary Tweed about there upcoming Xbox Live Community Game, Clover. While talking about the game, we asked the question that’s most talked about when this game is brought up, why is this not an officially endorsed XBLA title? He didn’t mix words: “Making titles available on XBLA is a much more complicated and expensive process than releasing something through Community Games.” Smaller independent companies haven’t got the financial backing as many larger XBLA developers have. “To go down the XBLA route would have required us to develop a nearly-complete demo to attract publisher interest, and by the time we’d done that we might as well have developed something that could make an immediate return on investment.”

“It’s also of note that XBLA certification is a very stringent process, as Jeff Minter would certainly have you know,” said Jones. “There are some ’completed’ XNA-based titles selected for release on XBLA that are still to pass certification a year on.” What we would like to know is which games are being held back.

He explains that to go through the XBLA route it would cost more money, may not make a return and even more worrying for smaller independent studies, it may not even get released straight away due to the certification period. This is certainly a worry. Microsoft advertises XBLA as the best platform for upcoming developers, well how could this be when the developers themselves say how hard it is to even get a game on there? We could very well see independent developers like Binary Tweed take the community route with less chance of success and far less publicity than the full XBLA release, which is a real shame.