I just wanted to make it clear the "Best Selling" list on the Xbox 360 is not sorted by units sold.  Do not try to draw any sales data conclusions by cross referencing data with that list.

Extremely early to be showing any numbers for RadRiverRun, but figured I'd toss 'em out here anyway.
RadRiverRun released on September 28th in the afternoon PST (has been out for approximately 2.5 days at this point) with a 240 Points price.
Our marketing plans are just beginning for October, so will give an update later on as we track the effects of that starting up.

September 28-30th:
2834 - Trial Downloads
31 - Purchases
1.09% - Conversion

Geographic Conversions:
1389 Trials in United States - 23 Purchased
579 Trials in United Kingdom - 4 Purchased
169 Trials in Germany - 2 Purchased
223 Trials in Canada - 1 Purchased
147 Trials in- France - 1 Purchased
(Trials downloads in other countries had no associated purchases.)

Honestly I'm extremely happy that I've had around 1,000 new people playing my game each day at this point.
The conversion ratio is extremely small, but I'm hoping that will improve over time. Hard to say, because I probably could've used a little more fun-factor on this one.
I still have fun playing it and the feedback I'm receiving from people who have played it and/or bought it has been pretty positive at this point, though.
We've still got no forum up on Xbox.com in the Indie Games section, so the feedback I've received has been direct. Which is pretty cool. :)

Revenge of the Evil Aliens

on marketplace since 6/9/09 (about 4 months)

Period Statistics
Trials: 2127
Purchases: 125
Purchase/Trial Ratio: 5.88 %

Stegersaurus Games:

By the way, WoC hit 10,000 sales

Period Statistics
in theory, if we stay at our current numbers, ezmuze+ will hit the 10k very soon. I think this is quite interesting since WoC has been out a fair bit longer, has had a price drop (if i recall correctly) and has a lot more press.
It also shows that the 800msp is workable - but thats a different (dead) topic.

What could be very interesting is that we are about to release a MAJOR update - over 60% of the source code has been overhauled for better UX and memory usage - and more importantly - is translated into 8 new languages .

madninjaskillz:

- is translated into 8 new languages .

Unfortunaly IG only supports 6 languages... you should not add languages that there is no review process for
EnglishFrenchGermanItalianJapaneseSpanish

madninjaskillz:

in theory, if we stay at our current numbers, ezmuze+ will hit the 10k very soon. I think this is quite interesting since WoC has been out a fair bit longer, has had a price drop (if i recall correctly) and has a lot more press.

http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2009/09/10000-sales.html
Take a look at the graphs--that's what they are there for. Weapon of Choice has been 400 points since launch (though several other games such as Colosseum and Biology Battle have dropped from 800 since launch.) Like I said in the blog, I chose 10k simply because it sounded good. I think several other games have crossed that mark, but I haven't seen a lot of direct postings about it. Some people like to share their info and some don't (which is obviously fine) but I think the more devs share, the better off everyone will (eventually) be when figuring out sales projections in the future.

And thanks for sharing your stats--I think it's great EZMuze has sold so well, and at a higher price! You've obviously nearly doubled the money we made on Weapon of Choice. Congrats to your crew.
And your conversion is really good! Maybe because when people want a music program they know what they're getting, and yours seems to be of good quality. I'll (hopefully) be posting a graph of Weapon of Choice's conversion rate through it's life on our dev log. It's had some interesting dips and peaks.

MommysBest:

Weapon of Choice has been 400 points since launch

i barely remember that far back - i purchased it the day it was available ;)

MommysBest:

I chose 10k simply because it sounded good

  same here - i was getting excited about the 10k mark when i read the post about you hitting it.

weve been very lucky and im very grateful. we really hit the nail on the head and i was lucky enough to get hamster on my team - look at the first ezmuze - looking back at it - its embarrasing. i think one benefit is that ezmuze is utilising the weakest part of xna - the sound stuff. weve got no competitors because no one wants the headaches i had to go thru to get it to work.

WoC is pretty much the title I look up to - more than things like game with zombies. its production values are where i want my games to be. WoC and flashback are the main things i show people when they ask about the game im designing.
the thing that worries me is i see some awesome stats for ezmuze - something im really proud of - but i see some quite sorry stats for other titles. even the WoC stats are not as good as i think they should be. it worries me because i dont want to keep churning out ezmuze but i would love to make a living out of indy games.

MommysBest:

Maybe because when people want a music program they know what they're getting

youve probably hit the nail on the head. it does worry me that we put conversion rates above sales. sure a good conversion rate confirms youve got a good demo...but when the sales are 5-10 a day, thats not great, even if u only get 10-20 trials a day (a whopping 50% conversion rate)

I hate to be negative, but when you want to take it to the next level like many of us do, youve got to be serious. that said - i CAN see indy games improving - the ratings REALLY helped ezmuze. i also see a lot of toss being rated high and games that really deserve more attention not getting the ratings they deserve.

Im hopeful for the future - but nervous too.

madninjaskillz:

WoC is pretty much the title I look up to - more than things like game with zombies. its production values are where i want my games to be. WoC and flashback are the main things i show people when they ask about the game im designing.

That kicks butt to hear. Thanks!

madninjaskillz:

even the WoC stats are not as good as i think they should be. it worries me because i dont want to keep churning out ezmuze but i would love to make a living out of indy games.

I agree they're not great. I'm trying to learn from it and do better. I hope you can learn from what I did wrong and improve. I've had opinons from friends saying that 'big' Indie games like Weapon of Choice and Grapple Buggy don't have a place on the service. That it needs to either be an XBLA game or a dollar game. That idea is a tough pill for me to swallow, but I wanted to throw it out there for others to consider. I'm not trying to turn you off of it, just giving you some "drive time" ideas to ponder.

I think it's reasonable to say when there's direct competitors on XBLA, then your smaller 'big' Indie game will have a tougher time succeeding. Something to consider when designing your next game. When I was at E3 with Grapple Buggy I literally heard for the first time about Shadow Complex. Never during development or any of the original design time. They're not identical thankfully, but I thought I was pushing a new Super Metroid vibe on the 360 before others. There's no going back now, but boy did that suck.

madninjaskillz:

sure a good conversion rate confirms youve got a good demo...but when the sales are 5-10 a day, thats not great, even if u only get 10-20 trials a day (a whopping 50% conversion rate)

Yes, I agree. The conversion rate gets a lot of attention. Take from it what you can, WoC is currently selling around 10-15 copies a day (14 sales on Oct 1st and around 280 trials, all regions). It's been out 10 months, it got a good amount of press, it's 5 bucks, but the newer aspects of the service weren't in place. Look at those graphs, plan your numbers for your next game if WoC fits it at all.

madninjaskillz:

I hate to be negative, but when you want to take it to the next level like many of us do, youve got to be serious. that said - i CAN see indy games improving - the ratings REALLY helped ezmuze. i also see a lot of toss being rated high and games that really deserve more attention not getting the ratings they deserve.
Im hopeful for the future - but nervous too.

I agree, the ratings helped/are helping a ton. I think that's a factor you can include in your calcuations that WoC didn't get at launch though it did have the "what is this Community Games thing all about" spike.

madninjaskillz:

sure a good conversion rate confirms youve got a good demo...

And if you have/have had any ideas as to how to improve the demo experience of WoC, please by all means, email me! nathan=at=mommysbestgames-dot-com.

MommysBest:

That it needs to either be an XBLA game or a dollar game.

i really think youve hit the nail on the head there. and i think microsoft want that and helped push it that way with the price changes. It makes sense. If we all try to make big uber games - theres no benefit for the end user - but if community games are small unique games theres a lot of benefit for the end user.

I have a lot of ideas for small games that i intended to make for practice reasons before embarking on a massive game. im now thinking they should be my focus. Im also thinking that to really make money i need to quit my day job and make a LOT of small games, keep pumping them out - and hope i build a name for myself that we can move onto bigger better things than XBLIG. ezmuze+ already has that option so we shall see.

madninjaskillz:

MommysBest:

That it needs to either be an XBLA game or a dollar game.

i really think youve hit the nail on the head there. and i think microsoft want that and helped push it that way with the price changes. It makes sense. If we all try to make big uber games - theres no benefit for the end user - but if community games are small unique games theres a lot of benefit for the end user.

I have a lot of ideas for small games that i intended to make for practice reasons before embarking on a massive game. im now thinking they should be my focus. Im also thinking that to really make money i need to quit my day job and make a LOT of small games, keep pumping them out - and hope i build a name for myself that we can move onto bigger better things than XBLIG. ezmuze+ already has that option so we shall see.

 
As a gamer, I'd probably be far less interested in the service if that trend (low manhour, expirimental, profit churn games) continues.  I think a balance is neccessary and I am highly concerned that too many devs are thinking "quick buck" after the success of a couple small $1 games.   Also, once you notice a trend, it's probably going to die/change - best to go the other direction. :)

i think it simply breaks down to if u want something HUGE you buy a disk - if you want something not quite as epic but still quite big you go to XBLA and if you just want a quick bit of cheap fun, you hit XBLIG

Bit of a shame really because there's really no reason why IG can't be as successful as XBLA and make the developers the same kind of money.

On a side note - we also went through the 10,000 sales barrier recently.

Fuzzy Bug:

On a side note - we also went through the 10,000 sales barrier recently.

Go Word Soup! That's great.

Fuzzy Bug:

Bit of a shame really because there's really no reason why IG can't be as successful as XBLA and make the developers the same kind of money.

I agree, I think James and the Zomb1es game showed everyone you can make some good money with a small game. Now it's just up to a game to show Indie you can make big money with a bigger game. I bet Dust will do great, just a matter of if it will end up on Indie or Arcade.

Thought I'd share a few interesting things we picked up with our 2 "games", myFishtank and Fireplace.

Fireplace started out at $ 5 (and got a lot of slack for it being overpriced), once we were allowed to drop the price we dropped it down to $ 2.5 dollars but it actually didn't pay off, ended up with about $ 8 less per 100 downloads.
3 Months later we decided to try the $ 1 price point, and again we selling more copies but at the end of the day making about $ 2 less per 100 downloads than we did when selling it at $ 2.5.

The above stats were taken for months where Fireplace wasn't in any list at all, so download numbers weren't great.

Other things we have noticed over the last 10 months with Fireplace is that our daily download numbers have been gradually decreasing each month by about 15% (most likely because there is so many more new games added each week).
In August (the dashboard update happend) and we saw an increase in download numbers, but in September we saw a 50% decrease in downloads.

We might consider raising the price up to $ 3 and see how well that does for Fireplace.

myFishtank started out at $ 2.50 and did very well, we recently upped the price to $ 3 and are now making around $ 10 more per 100 downloads. So seems like $ 3 might actually be the sweet spot.

Our next (actual) game will be going into playtest/review this week and we going to try launching it at $ 1 to see how that does with the mass numbers of downloads on the release weeks.

Things I would like to see changed/added....
Remove the IGN top picks list... and replace it with a Top 20 Hot list that takes every games last 100 downloads (this could be a higher number) and calculates how much money it made and sorts by that list.

Example:
Game A is selling at $ 1 and sells 35 out of the last 100 downloads. (equivalent of $35 per 100 downloads)
Game B is selling at $ 3 and sells 14 out of the last 100 downloads. (equivalent of $42 per 100 downloads)

So game B would top the list in the above case.

Reason why I think this would help is that the list would be constantly changing from day to day giving more games more exposure, as soon as a game makes the list it would start getting a lot more downloads again and therefore the conversion rate would probably drop a little again so the list would continually change from day to day. Also generally when you have less downloads your conversion rate goes up so you could easily bounce back into the top 20 hot list for a day or two. And of course for Microsoft this would see more revenue for them as games that sell well should be getting more attention than games that don't sell well.

The Top 20 rated games list is great if you coming to Indie games for the first time (or if you are a Dev of any of those games of course), but once you've tried all those games that list hardly ever changes so I would think it's starting to become a list that adds little value to the end user as time goes on. (same applies to XBLA and all the rest).

Cheers.

Slingstar's first full day was Sunday: sold 108 copies at an 8.5% conversion, but the ratings keep nosing up and I toed onto the top rated about midnight (pacific time) last night, and seem to be hanging on to the #20 spot, so we'll see what the rest of the week brings.

CVO:

As a gamer, I'd probably be far less interested in the service if that trend (low manhour, expirimental, profit churn games) continues.  I think a balance is neccessary and I am highly concerned that too many devs are thinking "quick buck" after the success of a couple small $1 games.   Also, once you notice a trend, it's probably going to die/change - best to go the other direction. :)

I don't think it's nessassarily devs that are seeking a quick buck but rather they're trying to make any buck. Making a smaller $1 game means its easier to recoup expenses and far, far less risky to develop.

http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=179

The blog post above illistrates how quickly download numbers can drop off once you come off the "New Release" listing. If I were a fulltime game developer and rellied on Nasty to make a living, I would be sunk right now... not because conversion rates for Nasty are bad (they're actually nearly 7% this month so far, good for a 400 point game IMO) but because overall downloads have been so low.

My next game will be a lot smaller... because quite frankly, I'm not about to invest the same amount of time, money, and resources into a game only for it to do this badly. A small game can easily recoup most (maybe all) of the development costs during that intial period where its download are high. Not so with a longer to develop game.

We are getting close to 20k sales on the Drum Kit, our second game Enemy at the Gate is plugging away, still not below the top 40.

The deal is not to put too much time into any game, unless of course you are not trying to make money. There are many reasons to make a game, and only one of them is making money.

If you really are interested in making money I'd look at this: http://www.nimblebit.com/?p=1105 if you look at their numbers and such you will see no games took over 1 month or 2 developers. Right now we are like the music industry in the 60's. There is money to be made in making hit singles. It really seems that most of us want to overprice our game. I know how it feels to struggle with something you feel it's worth it, but really as my son said, he doesn't think any game on indy games is worth $5. That's my opinion anyway.

Big Daddio:

If you really are interested in making money I'd look at this: http://www.nimblebit.com/?p=1105 if you look at their numbers and such you will see no games took over 1 month or 2 developers.

But those are iPhone apps. Are they really comparable to an XBLIG? I don't think we should want <1 month dev cycle games here... (and isn't this getting offtopic for the thread)

Big Daddio:

I know how it feels to struggle with something you feel it's worth it, but really as my son said, he doesn't think any game on indy games is worth $5. That's my opinion anyway.

I think that's a feeling that many people share, which is unfortunate because $5 is so little already yet we're expected to sell games for less than a cup of coffee. I guess in a digital world, people expect the world and don't want to pay for it.

I certainly think there are a select few Indie games that are worth the $5, but I don't care about things like Achievements or leaderboards that make the $5 XBLA games so attractive to many.

One month for an XBLIG seems pretty short to me (I'm gonna shoot for 3-4 months per game), but I know it has been done (and sold well) for some smaller games. It would be more feesible for someone that can do this full time instead of part time (like me). Whether or not you can keep up the creativity long enough to release a good game each month is the big question.

I just noticed last night that sales of In the Pit have actually gone down significantly since I lowered the price from 400 points to 240 points. The whole reason I lowered the price was to get more people to play the full version, but it's somehow had the opposite effect, so now I think I'll raise the price back up to 400 points in a few days a month when the three-month price change wait period is up. Crazy.

Kris Steele:

One month for an XBLIG seems pretty short to me (I'm gonna shoot for 3-4 months per game), but I know it has been done (and sold well) for some smaller games. It would be more feesible for someone that can do this full time instead of part time (like me).

3-4 months seems pretty reasonable to me once you've developed a decent reusable codebase. I'm at the tail end of an 8-9 month development cycle for my first game, and the learning experience was such that I wouldn't trade the time investment at all, but I'm definitely going to go for simpler designs in the future. (I can't do this full time either :) )

Studio Hunty:

I just noticed last night that sales of In the Pit have actually gone down significantly since I lowered the price from 400 points to 240 points. The whole reason I lowered the price was to get more people to play the full version, but it's somehow had the opposite effect, so now I think I'll raise the price back up to 400 points in a few days. Crazy.

Did download numbers improve at all when you lowered the price or did they stay the same (or get worse)? How much did conversion rates change (good or bad)?

There was a spike in trials, but no change in sales, so my conversion rate was actually worse!

When I dropped Drum Kit to $1 (80 pts) I saw a huge uptick in sales, a smaller uptick in downloads, I went from 8% to 20%. So mathematically it was a wash. Basically equal dollars . However it sold alot more which kept it in front of people. I do believe otherwise it would have dropped down and gone away.

What I was trying to show you with the nimblebits post was how another small developer deals with cheap product in a crowded marketplace. If anything the iPhone is harder to make a dollar and get eyes looking at your stuff. You can have a number of days to make an impression on XBLIG by being in the what's new. You may not have a day on the iPhone.  The deal is they are not thinking like EA jr, they don't have long development cycles. Neither of my games took a month, and both have made more money than I would have made doing contract work for the same amount of time.

Bomb Disposal Expert is getting closer to the 1.000 purchases and we have disclose a monthly statistics since the release last april: http://www.evolutiondreamstudio.com/blog/en/bomb-disposal-expert-sales-xblig/

There is an interesiting mini-boost after we lower the price from 240 to 80 points, but it could also be due the whole platform improvement.

As we are reading some interesting numbers and news about the performance of some games since the platform changes of July we are thinking on working on some new games.