Wii owns the Platforme genre

[mrstickball]

jarrod said:

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.

Certainly fine. You don't have to take my word for it.

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.

My argument of 5% of sales over 24 months is based on a long-tail analysis of over 200 unique Xbox Live Arcade titles that have released since November 2007. You don't have to just take my word for it, Microsoft also published information about this a few years ago:

As for my argument about LIMBO selling 25,000-30,000 2 years from now - both Summer of Arcade leaders are selling in that area every month. Castle Crashers is 28 months old, and Trials HD is 16 months old. Both average between 25,000-30,000 units on any given month. So I would say that its reasonable to expect LIMBO to as well.

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.

You are correct, my apologies. Some of the games we have discussed did have one week sales. But please understand that one sale for one week doesn't usually equate to massive, LTD-defining patterns. Most games on XBLA that see a 50% off sale see a 200-300% increase in unit sales for that month, then return to whatever their original pattern was. Because of that, it usually makes up a small portion of Life to Date sales. Super Meat Boy is certainly a major exception, as it launched at $10.00 USD (800MSP), then went to $15.00 USD (1200MSP), then back on sale to $10.00 (800MSP) during December. However, no other game in the history has exhibited such a sales pattern. In the case of Cloning Clyde, I forgot that they did reduce the price on it. However, it still saw strong sales prior to the price drop.

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.

I wouldn't call ~50,000 units its first month a 'bomb'. However, I get your point. 'Splosion Man was their only bona-fide big hit on the market place. However, the cost of development on XBLA is so low, I would imagine that The Maw bankrolled both 'Splosion Man and Comic Jumper.

Now, if you want to talk a bomb, talk about the Comic Jumper-like title Unbound Saga. Now that's a bomb.

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). 

Ah, but you missed my comments on promotion. I argued that a lot of the promotional tendencies come from the developers and publishers, not just Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft does a great job when they have a special sale like the Block Party, Summer of Arcade, or The Games Feast. However, if you have access to data like I do, you start to understand that the picture is a little different: If you promote a title properly, it does well even outside of what Microsoft does with the title. For example, you never really saw Deadliest Warrior: The Game being heavily favored by Microsoft. However, it was by Spike TV, which led to incredible sales. The same can be said for Dead Rising: Case Zero, which was after the Summer of Arcade promotion. Despite it releasing the week after, on an abnormal date (it is the only game in XBLA history to release outside of Wednesday, AFAIK), it was the best selling title of 2010 on XBLA. Again, it had massive coverage outside of Xbox Live Arcade, which fueled sales.

When you correlate them together, you find that external promotions have a far greater impact on Xbox Live Arcade than you want to give credit to. If a game has hype/notariety prior to release due to buzz, good reviews, ect, people will buy the game instantly without Microsoft promotions. When this happens, it usually results in higher placings on the 'Most Downloaded' chart, which is 1/4th of the potential retail space for the title (with the others being popularity, new releases, and finally the A-Z library). Therefore, it can correlate a bit better than if Microsoft promotes it on the dashboard.