Trials HD is one of the better games released during this year's Summer of Arcade promotion on Xbox Live, but the game does have a major flaw: the user-created tracks can only be traded among friends, and only the creator can give the track to a friend. This effectively stops the spread of content and, with no central server, there is no way to have a track spread out to a large number of people.

It turns out this issue was addressed by the game's developer back in July, and its explanation reveals something about the 360's online system: truly sharing user-created content is very hard to do.

On the game's official forum, the developer explained that among consoles, only LittleBigPlanet has universal sharing. That is, you can create content, upload it to a central server, and then anyone can use the content in their own game. Achieving this is not a simple thing.

"A system like [LittleBigPlanet's] requires huge server capacity and lots of paid moderators to check out all the levels before they can be available to all other players... the moderators are checking that no levels contain any vulgar stuff or break any copyrights," it was explained. "No Xbox 360 games yet have a system like this, and I am not sure if Microsoft is going to announce any this generation, as it requires lots of server capacity and work force."

By only allowing people who have friended one other to share content, you have a mutually agreed-upon relationship with anyone you're trading with. Once someone has made a reputation for their track via YouTube videos or word of mouth, you're encouraged to add them to your friend list manually and ask for the track. "The best level creators will receive lots of friend requests I believe, and we will have a forum topic about level trading to help finding good level creators to add to your friend list," the developer wrote.

No hope for widespread sharing of UGC in the near future

"Sony has made a huge financial effort to provide the server network for the LittleBigPlanet content sharing system and all the workforce that monitors and moderates the content every day... It's kind of a test case for user created content sharing for consoles," the developer wrote on the forum. "I am pretty sure that in future we get more open user created content sharing in consoles too, as we get more and more games that have used various means for user created content sharing without any major legal issues. It just requires some more time for the big players in the industry to adjust."

The issues with allowing content to spread freely are great. Without moderation you open yourself up for both legal and PR issues if obscene content begins to spread. If copyrighted material were to be added to levels or tracks, you would have to deal with takedown notices from the owners of the content being used. If you do moderate the content, you're stuck paying people to do nothing but check the content on a daily basis before allowing it on the server.

On Xbox Live Arcade titles, often made by smaller developers with a limited budget, that's simply not an option. Once the promotion ends and the sales of the game begin to dwindle, you still have to pay moderators or shut down the track sharing server. Limiting the track sharing to the creators of the track, and only then between people who are online friends, allows the limited ability to share content, without sticking RedLynx with the cost of moderating the content... and that would only happen if Microsoft had the infrastructure to provide the game its own server for content uploading and downloading. For an Xbox Live title, that's unlikely.