Has anyone put any thought into how they'll advertise their DBP and XBCC games?

I know, this thread is kind of nosey, and people might not want to share their marketing plans, but for those who want to post about theirs, this thread still stands.

I plan to use my blog and Ziggyware for any games that I may or may not wind up finishing :).

People usually do it in this forum... we've had people build lists of entries on their blogs too.

The only rules we have are against commercial usage so if you are trying to sell your game we may not allow it in here.

I was thinking more along the lines of advertising commercial games (Mine: Depends on the payment plan devised for XBcc whether I decide to put it up for a price or not).

I personally plan on making advertisements for my game on Youtube and buying some ad space on some popular websites, as well as using my signature in forums. And depending on the price, my brother and I are thinking about trying to buy ad space in some video game magazines (though I bet it will be expensive to do that).

I'm sure Ziggy will give you ad space for a small sum of money...

THough in general game developers is a very small subset of game players so advertising would need to be done in non developer forums. Hopefully xbox.com will have some forum space for community games though they may also be subject to the same no commercial use as this forum.

Magazines will be way outside the budget of most indies.

This is a great question to ask in the indie game forums - those folks have many years of experience in this sort of thing.

Also you can use many sites like http://www.gametunnel.com/ to get the word around. Ad space can be purchased for a good price.

I hear a spot at the Superbowl will reach a lot of people interested in some kind of games.

Currently, is there  a list of published .ccgames to play on the Xbox or are most windows? Or is the capability not available yet?

You can publish .ccgames for both Windows and Xbox 360. There isn't a single list of the ones available, though, so you'll have to search around for them. I found these two sites for some XNA games:

http://www.xnapost.com/xna_games.html

http://xnaprojects.net/

There is no list... game quality varies greatly, most people want to host the games on their own site and for the 360 people need to have the whole of XNA Game Studio AND a paid Creators Club membership so there is not much of an incentie for a portal. Especially since Microsoft is about to jump into that space. Search through these forums or over on www.ziggyware.com

 

Thanks for the info. It was my assumption that xbox would ultimatly be the portal but each of the resources listed had something to offer. Its interesting to see all the projects. Thanks again for the info.

So here's somehting for people to ponder.

I'm concerned about whether or not I should charge for my XBCC game when the time rolls around (assuming the developer gets money, not XBL points).

On the plus side, there's the benefit that if it's free, more people will download it, making it more likely to graduate to an XBLA status.

On the downside, if the game gets a lot of attention, but not enough to garner XBLA treatment, I've potentially lost quite a bit of money.

I could offer a free demo of the game and a much larger version of the game for charge, but I don't want to split the downloads for someone searching.


Could Microsoft potentially set up the XBCC so that I can upload two versions of the same game at the same time? What I mean is, someone looks at the title of my game in the list, and he selects it. He sees the free demo version, and the complete version that costs money, each download of each going to the rating of both (with user feed back factored in, too).