The Xbox Live Community Games will undergo a make-over sometime in July or perhaps a little later when Microsoft will rename the section to Xbox Live Indie Games.

As part of this change Microsoft will also be adding user ratings to both the Xbox Live Indie Games section as well as many of the other sections, including the Xbox Live Arcade as well. Users will be also able to rate content of games based on their community ratings.

From what we have been told, Microsoft has spent a lot of time listening to what users wanted out of the Xbox Live Community Games before deciding what changes were to be made. New features will be included in the next round of the 3.1 XNA Game Studio, which will add new tools to the creation toolset, including Xbox Live Avatar support, eight-way Xbox Live Party Group Chat support, and video playback within games.

The addition of avatar support was something that many never thought would arrive for community games because until now this had been reserved for retail and Xbox Live Arcade titles only. With the XNA Game Studio 3.1 indie developers will be able to use Avatars within their games as well as animate and render avatars within their titles.

The changes could lead to all kinds of new titles that are even better than some of the titles that have been released so far. Many of the community titles that have been released to date have been highly successful and popular and have offered a variety of new things for players to check out and play.