XBLA sales revenue skyrocketed in July... I created this thread on July 9. Coincidence?
Microsoft reaches the largest month ever thanks to big 'Summer of Arcade' titles
Microsoft proved this month that the Summer of Arcade lineup wasn't just a promotion, but a force to be reckoned with. The digital gaming platform brought in the highest revenue ever for a single month, beating last month's amazing cume of $14.7 million USD with $16.7 million USD. This cume represents a remarkable 49% increase from last year's 'Summer of Arcade' promotion, which was also a record breaker for Microsoft, at $11.2 million USD. Last year's major titles included favors such as 'Geometry Wars 2', 'Braid' and the blockbuster 'Castle Crashers'.
Top 10 titles certainly had their way with the charts, as they accounted for $14 million in revenue thanks to five titles that managed to gross over $1 million in revenue - a new record. According to the chart provided by FADE, the Xbox Live Arcade Market has seen a year over year increase of 30% by the end of August - mostly due to the lift in July and August.
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
