It's been a strange few weeks for the Xbox Live Arcade platform. While Watchmen began to bend the rules of XBLA releases last week's NCAA Basketball MME has completely broken them, following almost none of the regular requirements for release and possibly changing the landscape of the future of the Xbox Live Arcade.

After the surprise announcement for NCAA MME a week before its release, Adam Pavlacka at Worthplaying.com got in touch with the developers at EA Canada on the process to how the game came to be and the process of getting such a large game on the marketplace in the first place.

In the interview Connor Dougan, producer on NCAA MME explains that their pitch to Microsoft was initially declined, citing that Microsoft "[didn't] have the infrastructure to support it". However Microsoft quickly came back to them, citing that this was an idea worth giving a shot, and that would "try this to set us up for the future".

Initially the development team didn't even know how the game would be supported, going back and forth with the team at Microsoft as to how it would be supported on the platform. It appears that they negotiated to a point where this is not even considered to be an Xbox Live Arcade title, despite it being in the recent release list.

This is a "new, fully sized, 1.5 GB game", and as you can see from the marketplace box art, it is not situated with an "Xbox Live Arcade" banner across the top. Not being an Xbox Live Arcade title allows the team to forgo a whole selection of XBLA specific rules set in the Technical Certification Requirement list, or TCRs, which all XBLA developers must follow. This includes featuring leaderboards, specifically having 12 different achievements and the requirement for a demo, in which none are in NCAA MME. I believe that file size is not a part of the TCRs, but rather negotiated when coming onto the Xbox Live Arcade.

Instead of advertising the game normally like an XBLA title, it will be advertised directly through the Xbox's new dashboard as a new game for people to buy and play. Right now it headlines the March Madness section of the US marketplace, they will be having question time with the developers, and have even slotted in a calendar date for a Family Game Night promotion.

This is not the first time EA has bent the rules to the Xbox Live Arcade. Last year EA released both the EA Live Draft Tracker and Live Score Tracker, which went hand in hand with EA's Fantasy Football program on PC. They were nothing more than adding additional features to the tracking system, but had to fit under the schema of Xbox Live Arcade.

This lead to some utterly ridiculous achievements. Now that the draft tipping is now over, both of these programs cannot be downloaded over Xbox Live anymore.

This week's release of Hasbro Family Game Night is another example of EA breaking the rules. FGN is a download of a platform created for Hasbro titles - you download the main application, and then download each title as if it were an "expansion", with each expansion including 200 Gamerscore, making the title appear to have 1400 Gamerscore from the outset.

If NCAA MME is not an Xbox Live Arcade title in the strictest of senses, could we see Microsoft expanding on this concept even more? Could we see a split between Xbox Live Arcade releases and new Xbox Live Marketplace games? Could we see games brand new full priced Xbox titles become downloadable to your Xbox, like the PlayStation Network and Burnout Paradise? All we know is that EA are suddenly pushing the envelope on how games are distributed on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, and they get what they want.

Check out the full interview with Connor Dougan here. It's a great interview if you want to get some information on the inside of the Xbox team.