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jarrod on 18 January 2011
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mrstickball said:
jarrod said:

I should've read closer, GamerBytes indeed mentioned the difficulty for correctly measuring Sonic 4E1 due to the nature of it's scoreboard process.  I'm curious what metrics you're using to arrive at sales though?  The "minimum threshold" based off Case Zero's 62k October sales is pretty faulty given Sonic 4 was only even available for 3 of those weeks.  By it's 4th week (in November) Sonic 4 was outside the XBLA top 10 even according to Nelson, and well below Case Zero.  Speaking of which, Nelson didn't post the top Live activity lists in October at all due to his schedule... can you kindly link me to where exactly he posted Sonic 4 leading it debut week?

Honestly, I looked all over Major Nelson's blog. I swore he had lists for October at some point last year. I am wondering if he may of removed them. As for sales metrics - that is proprietary. I can't explain too much, because the methodology gives me a job and edge to ensure that reliable data is produced for the market for clients. However, I can say that the method tracks actual users buying real titles on Xbox Live Arcade, among other services I work with.

Looking it up, Braid went from ~326k sales it's first full year to ~64k it's second full year (GB estimates).  That's still pretty decent in terms of legs, but doing just 20% of it's first year sales in it's second isn't exactly stellar given it's one of the high watermark XBLA success stories, and not even uncommon at retail for high volume sellers (indeed the top retail games are doing significantly more than just 20% YOY).  Braid didn't even make the top 20 XBLA sellers for 2009 (yet even titles like TMNT1, Marble Blast and Puzzle Fighter did), I'd say that's fair game for "fizzled".  It's first week sales according to Blow himself were 55k, and 1st month was "over 100k" which puts the year two ratio (on average) just slightly above 5% monthly of that too (and that's best case, if Braid did over 106k, it drops below 5%). Digital still has a shelf life, it's different from retail in many ways, but it's still a shelf life with promotion, media coverage, word of mouth, accessibility, competition, sequels and other factors weighing in on the long term success of the product (including the potential for delisting or future platform incompatibility).  If Braid only barely manages your month 5% average of 1st month figure, and it's inarguably one of the services sales highlights, I very much have to question the validity of your figure at all.  And Limbo did 323k it's first full month... 25-30k monthly into perpetuity is a nice dream, but looking at the above figures, it seems it'll only be ever that. ;)

To be fair, the other aspect of Braid is that it did get launched on 2 other platforms - PSN and Steam, so it has quite a bit of other ways that it can and indeed does, sell. Braid sold 132,000 copies in December alone on Steam, which I would argue is a pretty reasonable argument as to why it may be seen as 'fizzled' on XBLA - more competition from other services. It has also sold ~100,000 copies on PSN which was launched more than a year after the XBLA release (November 2009), in You throw all 3 platforms together, and Braid sold very well in 2009 and 2010. It has sold ~750,000 copies between all 3 services. I'd consider that pretty good for an initial launch of 100,000 units on XBLA by two guys.

Comparatively, the other games you listed are XBLA-only. Do not forget that the ARP also comes into play for some titles you mentioned - in 2009, Braid was still a $15 title. Marble Blast and TMNT were both $5 titles, so Braid could of been #21 and still greatly outsold both titles in terms of revenue (I think it was #25 or so). And finally, TMNT and Marble Blast have outsold Braid as well, so they should indeed be higher ranked by Nelson.

I also feel the need to correct you on "Microsoft promotions", while titles like N Plus, Super Meat Boy, The Maw and Cloning Clyde weren't part of the summer of arcade promotions, each title did get significant dashboard visibility, repeated promotional discounts and the last two were even published by Microsoft.  In fact, Team Meat went on record saying that their tie up (for promotion and positioning on Live Arcade) with MS even prevents them from doing a PSN version of SMB, ever.  This is actually part and parcel of Microsoft's divided kingdom for indie devs, even getting on "Arcade" rather than "Indies" is considered a promotional service in itself between Microsoft and small developers.  Do you think any of these games would've sold even a fraction as much on the latter tier service?

N has never recieved a promotional discount. Nor has Cloning Clyde. Indeed, Team Meat did get some concessions from Microsoft due to publishing, but that is only one of the mentioned titles. Twisted Pixel never had any major concessions for The Maw, except for one sale, which many games are starting to get, now that the new head of Xbox Live Arcade seems to be far more pro-active with helping the service via discounts.

Furthermore, dashboard visibility is usually derived from the quality of the game. Good games get more visibility, as XBLA ranks games 3 ways: release date, user rating, and popularity. Therefore, if a game is good, it usually leads to being more visible, regardless of how Microsoft promoted it. Finally, many developers simply do a poor job of promoting their own titles. Its a heavily recirpocating system - a good game gets buzz, which boosts it on the charts, which more people see, which leads to more sales, which leads to a higher position on their promotional lists.




Fair enough, I can respect and appreciate that for business reasons some methodology needs to remain undisclosed. But all the same, I hope you understand that's going to put your Sonic 4 figures into question in my mind, especially after the specious Case Zero reasoning.  Nelson however didn't remove the October figures, he never posted them according to the comments in November's first week, due his schedule around Kinect launch.  Sonic 4 leading it's debut week wouldn't surprise me at all though.

In regards to Braid, maybe I should take a step back and say I think the game has had exceptional sales, and I doubt it really could've done any better if released by any other means. I personally love it too. My only only issue is your claim that XBLA is some magic sales utopia, where games on average can expect sell 5% of first month sales monthly basically forever... the truth is obviously a lot more complex than that, which your butbutbutSteam/PSN backpeddaling here sort of belies (btw, NONE of the other 3 games I listed are XBLA only).  Braid was just one title I picked since it was already in conversation, and makes a good comparison to Limbo due to genre and context, but it even barely made that cutoff (and might not even have really).  I know you're going off the cuff and not looking at the specific figures, but when you're admittedly coming from a place of authority, I tend to expect a higher standard.  The likelihood of Limbo selling 30k a month in two years is so remote going off the available data, I'd say it's a bit irresponsible on your part to even throw that out there.  We all know it's not going to happen.

I know for a fact N Plus had at least one promotional discount in 2009 (to 400 points) because that's when I bought it.  A cursory google search supports that and even leads me to another earlier sale for the game (560 points, deal of the week promotion).  Likewise, a quick googling for Cloning Clyde leads toseveral sales (and even a price reduction, same week as Braid actually).  Super Meat Boy is barely 3 months old and has already had two promotional sales.  This information isn't hard to come by.

And Twsited Pixel most definitely had to make exclusivity concessions for their titles, hell Microsoft even published them.  Now that their newest platformer (Comic Jumper) basically bombed though, I'm curious if they'll start looking at other avenues versus the increasingly crowded and competitive (and restrictive) Live Marketplace?  I think Cloning Clyde and The Maw were both pretty average games, that really good a lot of goodwill sales for being among the first of their kind on the service.  'Splosion Man was legitimately pretty good though.

And you're wrong on dashboard coverage.  It's not simply user driven, deals are most frequently worked out for dashboard visibility and promotion ahead of time, and ultimately Microsoft selects what goes up and where.  The only "rise to the top" component of it is the "most popular" column, which tends to already reflect the most heavily promoted titles anyway.  It's a pretty far cry from the App Store, visibility is really one of the major sticking points indie devs have with XBLA (and something all the console DD services need to seriously work on imo, though MS does better than Sony or Nintendo).