
We've talked before about how the Xbox Store generally does a good job of curation compared to the likes of the Nintendo eShop, but that doesn't mean it's perfect - as evidenced by all the irritation around the Outbreak series.
It's not really about the games themselves, but simply how many versions of them are available on the Microsoft Store. At the time of writing, we've counted 61 (yes, 61) different editions / bundles of Outbreak games available on Xbox.
Here's just a very small sample of them:

Unsurprisingly, we've come across quite a few topics about Outbreak spam in recent months. Over on the Xbox Reddit, it seems to get brought up every month - and it's evidently causing frustration amongst plenty of Xbox owners:
There are many more examples like this, with the conclusion being that most commenters want to see Xbox take action. It's unclear whether the publisher has broken any rules by putting so many versions on the store, however.
What do you think about this? Does the Outbreak team have every right to keep publishing new bundles of their games if they're different, or should Xbox be stepping in and putting a limit on how many versions can be made available?
Let us know what you think about the situation down in the comments section below.
Comments 12
That's quite ridiculous.
" should Xbox be stepping in and putting a limit on how many versions can be made available?"
Yes, absolutely.
Is the game even any good. There are versions for 90 quid plus up there. I mean, Nintendo got nothing on these guys.
Outbreak and those Aery bird games are frequently getting shat out on the weekly. Xbox should monitor the marketplace spam.
Trying to abuse the system like this should put your game to the bottom of the pile, similar to how if Google thinks you are using black-hat SEO to artificially increase your ranking. Punish them.
How weird, I thought the exact same thing when I was browsing the store yesterday for the first time in months. I was like… Ain’t there a hundred of these already!?
Didn’t really delve in to see what the differences were or what collections they were, but I see the name pop up so many times and they never have good ratings.
@BrandNewOldSchool Nope. Don't even waste your money. When I was reviewing games, I think the highest I gave this series as 2/10 - the dev saw it on Metacritic and replied directly to the review trying to make excuses. It's quite literally, Resident Evil's ugly cousin - and that's putting it mildly. Very, very mildly.
There's some game called Cynthia that seems to have a new edition every week, too.
What do you think about this?
I think the store needs some filters. I'd love to be able to search by publisher / developer, and it's high time MS sorted the store reviews out.
Of the consoles, Xbox needs to tone down their advertising by a lot. I get Windows us full of ads but like for my Xbox, if I don't have GPU, I should not get ads for it everytime I am booting up the console or starting certain games. Let my people go!
@BrandNewOldSchool they released a demo in one of those Xbox demo events. It was awful, a not even passable Resident Evil clone.
But hey, at least I tried it for free and had a laugh with my brother.
Xbox shouldn't just try to do something about it. They NEED to do something about it. This is setting up a class action lawsuit in the future.
Also, steam gives us the option to ignore games we don't like or are not interested in. I wish Xbox did the same.
These practices actually make me ashamed to say that I've purchased some of their games. They're not awful if you're into that old RE style done by a small/tiny budget team, but this business practice is scummy and Xbox do need to crack down on stuff like this.
@Utena-mobile An ignore feature is essentially mandatory nowadays with how much junk can flood stores. Trying to browse the Switch eShop is nightmarish... but I probably don't need to tell you/anyone else that.
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