Murudai:

Wasn't it average yearly income in four months?

Actually it was "more than the average yearly income". So there are some games that made $30,000+. I guess Biology Battle is one of them but IIRC development costs were about 100k. Still wondering how one can spend 100k on such a game. :)

EdAndersenUK:

At this rate, "Cornflower Blue" will be the best game on here!

Wokin' on it now.
jk:D

I wonder how price has played into all this. The natural assumption would be to say that cheaper games correlate into more purchases (if the game is good). On the other side of things people sometimes feel that if a game is too cheap it must not be any good. I am by no means a marketing type person and wonder what we can learn from the sales data since we only have a limited audience at this time and just maybe we are giving away our games too cheap.

Just a thought...

Pandapadawan:

Actually it was "more than the average yearly income". So there are some games that made $30,000+. I guess Biology Battle is one of them but IIRC development costs were about 100k. Still wondering how one can spend 100k on such a game. :)

Have you any idea what just one talented developer costs for one month of work?

The good ones are will easily cost $8-12k and a game of that type usually takes months to develop, polish and test and thats just the salary for one developer.   Tbh 100k is cheap for such a game.   Hell our 'simple card game' probably took well over a man year of work to create. Yes it was the first for the platform so there was a lot of tech to build which can be reusued now, but still development aint cheap. 

So 200-800 points for good games are really not a whole lot, hell a single song for rockband will often set you back 160points.

Unarmed:

Pandapadawan:

Actually it was "more than the average yearly income". So there are some games that made $30,000+. I guess Biology Battle is one of them but IIRC development costs were about 100k. Still wondering how one can spend 100k on such a game. :)

Have you any idea what just one talented developer costs for one month of work?

The good ones are will easily cost $8-12k and a game of that type usually takes months to develop, polish and test and thats just the salary for one developer.   Tbh 100k is cheap for such a game.   Hell our 'simple card game' probably took well over a man year of work to create. Yes it was the first for the platform so there was a lot of tech to build which can be reusued now, but still development aint cheap. 

So 200-800 points for good games are really not a whole lot, hell a single song for rockband will often set you back 160points.

I suspect you can get a good developer for under $8 a month (which amounts to nearly $96,000 a year).

I get your point though... it costs a lot to hire a team to create your game. Community Games is a lot more of a viable option if you can do this all yourself or can find people to work for credit or profit sharing. I've probably done 90% of my game myself, but that other 10% I could not do (some artwork and music) cost me a pretty penny. But I'd be ecstatic if I got $30,000 (or even $10,000) because my investment in money isn't that high (though my investment in time is, but thankfully I don't have to pay myself).

I'm sort of happy about this though... I'd rather see Community Games continue to be produced by the community.

Unarmed:

The good ones are will easily cost $8-12k

Yeah, I don't think so. Make it a third of your estimate. Tops. And in Thailand it will be much cheaper.

Tbh 100k is cheap for such a game.

Maybe the money went into multiplayer. For the singleplayer I find it way too expensive. Having a budget of 100k is what I call overambitious if you're a new developer on a new platform with no idea how much a success this platform will be.

 but still development aint cheap.

Right, but most of the money is spent on employees. I used to work for a developer with seven employees (me included) and we were able to produce AA-titles with lots of content. Something like Biology Battle could be more or less a two person-job. A programmer, an artist - but the artist would only be needed towards the end of the development process.

Pandapadawan:

Unarmed:

The good ones are will easily cost $8-12k

Yeah, I don't think so. Make it a third of your estimate. Tops. And in Thailand it will be much cheaper.

I am a professional developer and have been so for over eight years. Not even my start salary was close to half of that. Just so you know.

Last time I checked a total fresh programmer with a university degree is averaging around $5k a month these days.

Thinking more about this, you would be absolutely BONKERS to release a game at 800 points and think you'll recoup the costs required to make a game worth 800 points. Even if your game IS worth 800 points, nobody is going to buy it without real achievements. Some people literally buy every single Live Arcade game only for the gamerpoints.

Tbh 100k is cheap for such a game.

Maybe the money went into multiplayer. For the singleplayer I find it way too expensive. Having a budget of 100k is what I call overambitious if you're a new developer on a new platform with no idea how much a success this platform will be.

I think Biology Battle is likely a shining example of the 80/20 rule: 80% of the effort becomes 20% of the result.  If I wanted to throw together a bare-bones twin-stick shooter with dumb, randomly-spawning enemies and crappy graphics, I could probably be finished relatively quickly.  But BB is really, really, really polished.  The core gameplay probably didn't take a whole lot of time to create, but fine-tuning everything, creating the graphics and effects, the extra modes, etc. etc. is what I imagine took so long.

Just as an example, Snake360 definitely followed this rule.  I started with a one-level Survival Mode demo.  Starting with snake and wall classes I'd written recently in C++, it took less than a week to get it running, and if I showed it off it would look very similar to the finished game (and played identically to Survival Mode in the finished game).  From that point, I probably spent about 500 hours on Snake360, working on the interface, modes, and of course 300 levels.  I shot for a very high level of polish and although I feel that I achieved it, that took a LOT of time.  I'm sure BB was no different...and I honestly will say that it looks a heck of a lot better than Snake360!

I wanted to correct a poster on the last page who said that this is the only thread about sales numbers.  It's not.  Look for "Share your sales numbers."  Mine are in there.  Snake360 was not a dismal failure or a great success; I'd say it was somewhere in the middle.  If you count Lite's sales as worth half of the full version, I moved about 1650 units.  I didn't add up total downloads but I think it was well into the five digits. 

Anyway, I wanted to mention a theory of mine that could point to why Microsoft is not doing more promotion of Community Games, which launched in the holiday season of last year as we all know.

EA: "Hey Microsoft!"
Microsoft: "Yeah?"
EA: "We just wanted you to know that we're launching new IPs this holiday season, as well as releasing new installments in our existing series.  We have high sales expectations, and it's come to our attention that we're going to be competing with hobbyist programmers."
Microsoft: "Well...yes.  So what?"
EA: "We can't compete on price with these people, and maybe at least one of them will deliver something of high quality.  We don't want that kind of competition.  Please see to it that Community Games get as little exposure as possible."
Microsoft: "Well, we already promised..."
Activision: "That is none of our concern.  You would do well to heed our advice."
XBLA developers: "And make sure they never get Achievements or Leaderboards!  That would kill us!"
Small retail developer: "I'm already dying over here!"
Activision: "And you will join him, if you do not submit to our demands."
Microsoft: "Okay...okay...as you wish..."

We have been given a great opportunity to develop games ourselves, and publish them for virtually zero cost.  I would assume, going forward, that we are not going to get many more significant benefits over and above what we already have.  At least, I would not count on any additional promotion from Microsoft.  And if they don't promote us, it may not be their fault, or even their decision.  How would you feel if your company's retail game, which cost significant $$$ to translate/license or develop from scratch, then more significant $$$ to get ESRB rated, put through cert and published, was getting less press exposure--and perhaps even fewer sales--than a virtual fireplace developed at low cost and published for $99?

It is in Microsoft's best interest to have more XBLA and retail games developed for them and not fewer.  Look at how the PS2 thrived as literally thousands of games became available...MS wants the 360 to be the new PS2.  If CG were to be the new iTunes App Store, I'd be re-thinking my retail/XBLA projects (if I had any) or moving them to other, competing platforms--which MS does NOT want.  CG can't become a phenomenon, otherwise it would be risky for MS to continue it.

I feel that the biggest threat to CG is its own success, and for it to continue, it needs to stay--more or less--the way it is.

Pandapadawan:

I think you really suffered from being a launch title. I know Organon was the first community game I ever started and I was quite impressed with the amount of polish. I decided to buy it sometime, then went on to check out other games. I came across Artoon and that game pretty much consumed all my time and points. :D In fact I didn't even think about Organon until I saw your postings in this thread and searched the forum to find out which game you developed. Well, what can I say? I just bought Organon. It's a great game, maybe a bit too shallow (i.e. there's not much variety in gameplay or levels) but that's what most community games suffer from. So I think your game was just in the right place at the wrong time.

Thank you very much Pandapadawan.

Running Pixel:

Here we need HOPE. If our bestsellers makes not as much money as Iphone's ones (much more than ten time less!) you can only hope to make a pretty decent amount of money with a 4ever top selling app/game (but not to became a rich guy).

If our best sellers aren't making as much money, there is a certain level of blame on Microsoft for what I feel are some large discoverability issues but part of it could also be that the games on XBLCG simply aren't the quality of the top selling iPhone games. I firmly believe this, so I think you can only blame the market so long before you have to take a hard look at your game and think about whether or not it matches those top selling iPhone games in quality.

yyr:

We have been given a great opportunity to develop games ourselves, and publish them for virtually zero cost.  I would assume, going forward, that we are not going to get many more significant benefits over and above what we already have.  At least, I would not count on any additional promotion from Microsoft.

Well I kind of agree with the second bit about promotion(they won't promote our games per se until they are better than XBLA games, will promote CG and what it means), but I hope that eventually we will at least have a nicer way of browsing the games, it would be nice to have a list(quick working one) with pictures or small thumbnail videos, even nicer if we could have ratings. I think that would change things. But anyway this is off topic.

(;_;)
 :  :
 :  :

on the iPhone:

The reason those games are doing so well I believe is because the iPhone is not a gaming platform.  People think its neat to have a game on a phone and if your sitting there bored you can go browse through and find something entertaining for .99.  Then we move to the xbox....Games is what the xbox does and it does it very very well.  People expect to have games and they have paid well to have those games.  They are looking to be wowed and for very little money if they happen to get bored of the set of $50 games they have...they can go get more games from xbla for not all that much money, professional high quality polished games.  Then you move down to community games which never really got exposure and in reality aren't that much cheaper than a lot of the xbla games that have more polish AND achievements among other things.

So no...its not all that surprising to me that the iphone had done so much better for games than the xbox.

now....when you move to the community games area and you happen to see that "WOW my xbox can be a fireplace! cool"....they do much better because its something different that your xbox can do for very little money.  so its not all that surprising to me that the apps have done fairly well on the xbox.


I believe that unless your game is seriously unique, fun, polished or otherwise separate from the field you will not see any real money because of the competition you have on the xbox.

So no I didn't expect much money from my first game (I kind of expected this situation) and I know what I will have to do in order to make money and it might take a lot more time than I can afford to spend on it. 

Greetings,

    I'm not complaining about our numbers, they were about what we expected, some lower, some higher, but higher overall. However I would say that there are really two issues.

1 - Some games just weren't going to sell. There are many possible reasons that you just have to be honest with yourself about. Quality could be bad, too many simular games, Arcade versions of just about the same game, and even sometimes players just don't like a game. Microsoft can't do anything about these. These are issues you have to learn and grow from.

2 - Clearly Microsoft has not done enough to educate players about Community Games. Golden Royal Blackjack did very well and we very pleased with it. However as a top game it only had ~68,000 trial downloads. With millions of Xbox LIVE users we had expected the trial downloads to be much higher. We hadn't really expected the sales to be higher than we got, they were about 50% more than we projected so we are pleased with that. Golden Royal Blackjack had a high conversion rate and that is how we beat projections. Since we used a much higher trial rate and a much lower conversion rate we ended up fine. I would say there is close to no chance that more than 100,000 players know about Community Games. Even the name doesn't help us, being really honest, if you weren't a developer would you have any idea what "Community Games" means? Microsoft uses the term Community all over the Xbox for many different things.

Also I just picked up an Xbox Elite, it came with a notice inside telling you about the New Xbox Experience. It pushes features that are not even available yet, as well as the Arcade, but there are no mention of Community Games.

Right now I just don't see ratings helping any if not enough people go there to even see them. It may eventually take care of itself as there seems to be new people who find the Community Games Channel every day. Perhaps by the end of the year there will be enough who know about it. Though it could be people go there and don't want our games, I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't download a trial of a top game just to see what the fuss is all about.

Patrick

Nick Gravelyn:

Running Pixel:

Here we need HOPE. If our bestsellers makes not as much money as Iphone's ones (much more than ten time less!) you can only hope to make a pretty decent amount of money with a 4ever top selling app/game (but not to became a rich guy).

If our best sellers aren't making as much money, there is a certain level of blame on Microsoft for what I feel are some large discoverability issues but part of it could also be that the games on XBLCG simply aren't the quality of the top selling iPhone games. I firmly believe this, so I think you can only blame the market so long before you have to take a hard look at your game and think about whether or not it matches those top selling iPhone games in quality.

Hi Nick,

look at this http://www.sfx-360.com/reviews/bricks4ever
and at this http://worththepoints.com/games/bricks4ever

it isn't the game of the year but looks like someone thinks it is a good game.

Talking about good quality games on the Iphone, there are things like Ifart, Isphere, Ibottle and lots other selling much more (much much more) than our top selling games.
Tell me... do you think Weapon of choice an Biology Battle, are not good or are unpolished (or they did'nt good marketing)?
They're some of our top sellers an looks like they did something around 30k...

CG sales will always be low while the community sees it as a collection of shabby low-quality games, and Microsoft is too ashamed of the general quality to do any real promoting.

What we *really* need right now is a machanism for culling out the rubbish. Some have suggested a ranking system but I think a far more effective approach is to remove all games below a certain conversion rate (just like Arcade does).

For those who don't know, a conversion rate is the percentage of people who eventually purchase the game after downloading the demo. ie. (sales / demo downloads) * 100

There is no better indication that a game is worth its salt than people purchasing it. If each game that goes on gets (say) a month's probation period and if after that time it has not acheived (say) 5% conversion rate then it gets the chop.

The overall effect is that all those games that were never going to get many sales anyway won't get any, but the increased quality and profile of CG would see the actual decent games acheive far FAR more sales.

Unarmed:

Last time I checked a total fresh programmer with a university degree is averaging around $5k a month these days.

I need to ask for a raise!

Fervent Interactive:

now....when you move to the community games area and you happen to see that "WOW my xbox can be a fireplace! cool"....they do much better because its something different that your xbox can do for very little money.  so its not all that surprising to me that the apps have done fairly well on the xbox.

I can only speak for myself, I think a big chance for community games lies in the fact that XBLA becomes more and more expensive (Hasbro Family Game Night LOL). I consider myself an early adopter, I was a very good customer of the Arcade from the start and bought 80+ XBLA games. But in summer 2008 things went downhill. I bought Braid and that was pretty much it. There might not be a big difference between $10 and $15 for an XBLA game. But it becomes a big difference if you buy almost every second new game. So I pretty much stopped buying XBLA games and only got Banjo, The Maw and Peggle in the last six months. Instead I started buying community games because even if I don't totally liked them at 200 points they were pretty much an instant buy if there is anything good about it (gameplay or production value). I even bought some games for 800 points. I'm up to 37 now and have spent about $130. And I imagine that a lot of people would switch from XBLA to community games in the future - but they need to know it exists. Conversion rates seem to be fine but the number of downloads is way too low. I wonder if a lot of potential customers were simply put off by the rough start. The 4 minute trial, the overall bad quality of games, if you lose a customer it's very hard to get him back.

So no I didn't expect much money from my first game (I kind of expected this situation) and I know what I will have to do in order to make money and it might take a lot more time than I can afford to spend on it. 

You actually made some money today, bought Totem after the price cut. It's one of those games I don't particularly like, it's already too fast paced for a puzzler for my taste, but I can see the effort and appreciate the amount of polish. Next on my list are Audiball, Writer's Block and what was the name of that joke game? Dungeon something? Guess I also have to buy Hexy Trench and that new tower defense game. God, I hate tower defense. But I like the style. And most importantly I want YOU to continue develop games on Xbox 360, that's why I pay 200 points for games I probably won't ever play.

Star Gaming Network:

I would say there is close to no chance that more than 100,000 players know about Community Games.

That's about my estimate as well. And this is something only Microsoft can change. They need to feature it wherever they can, maybe even at their E3 press conference. Or they could create a short Halo minigame (2d sidescroller) and release it exclusively on community games. The publicity would be huge.

Running Pixel:

...and one on the top for three weeks we did...

Which game?  And by "one on the top", do you mean in the top 10?  I'm sorry but I didn't follow you...

reedake2:

CG sales will always be low while the community sees it as a collection of shabby low-quality games, and Microsoft is too ashamed of the general quality to do any real promoting.

This is exactly why, as I said before, they need a user rating system and then more promotion for the service, if Microsoft wants to see the sales increase.  The first thing a player sees upon hitting Community Games should be:

Top Rated

Above that should be the Most Popular and New Arrivals categories.  Perhaps then the cream can rise to the top, and people who browse to the section won't see a bunch of massage games and flip away in disgust.  Instead, I predict they will see Biology Battle, Solar, Colosseum, Weapon of Choice, Miner Dig Deep, and other games that aren't poorly-produced one-week endeavors.

Lack of exposure is, indeed, the second problem.  And I still think it would be best solved by simply putting ads in the Spotlight section.  But first there needs to be an impression of quality, so that exposure actually converts into players who are willing to return to the Community Games section for more purchases.  It does us no good if they jump in, don't see anything they like, and never come back.

Matthew Doucette:

Running Pixel:

...and one on the top for three weeks we did...

Which game?  And by "one on the top", do you mean in the top 10?  I'm sorry but I didn't follow you...

yep friend, Brick4ever, in the top10 for three weeks (and I know for sure that Major Nelson played my game, I saw it on his profile :D )

Pandapadawan:

And this is something only Microsoft can change. They need to feature it wherever they can, maybe even at their E3 press conference.

Microsoft won't do this while the general quality of games is as low as it is. It would reflect poorly on XBOX and Microsoft generally. That's why they started culling underperforming Arcade games. Really it serves two purposes. Firstly it raises the overall quality of the section, and secondly it saves Microsoft lots of money on demo downloading bandwidth that will never convert to actual sales.

Pandapadawan:

Conversion rates seem to be fine but the number of downloads is way too low.

For many community games the conversion rate is pittiful. On the sales thread I was seeing many games coming in at 2-3% conversion rate, and these are mostly the people who aren't too ashamed to post their figures. Although I have no hard evidence I dare say there is a collection of games at under 1%. The good quality titles are hitting 10-20% conversion but they're currently hidden in the pile.

 

1% is not a bad conversion rate for software sales--it's actually pretty average.  It's more that some people are getting astonishingly high conversion rates.  10% is nearly unheard of, from what I've seen in the past.

reedake2:

For many community games the conversion rate is pittiful. On the sales thread I was seeing many games coming in at 2-3% conversion rate, and these are mostly the people who aren't too ashamed to post their figures. Although I have no hard evidence I dare say there is a collection of games at under 1%. The good quality titles are hitting 10-20% conversion but they're currently hidden in the pile.