| mrstickball said:
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:
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200 games is a little over half what's currently on XBLA (363). If you add in Xbox Indies and Games on Demand, that number swells to over 1,700. I'm going to guess your data more reflects the upper half of that 363 rather than the lower too, correct?
Giving me Arcade data from two years ago is giving me data that's two years out of date. Two years ago World of Goo sold 60% of it's total on WiiWare (leaving only 40% for Steam/D2D/retail/etc), Mega Man 9 was leading on WiiWare sales versus PSN/XBLA, and games like Lost Winds or FFCC My Life as a King were outpacing their publisher expectations... how exactly does that reflect on the WiiWare market of today? ;)
| mrstickball said:
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.
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Unlike Castle Crashers and Trials HD, LIMBO is pretty content lite 3 hour game with zero DLC. Both the latter have sustained sales thanks in large part to the heavy social component in each (co-op, scoreboards, etc) which makes for a pretty poor comparison to something like Limbo.
Once again, I think I should bring up Braid as the gold standard for comparison here. It's an indie darling IGF finalist (like Limbo), it's an aesthetically daring (like Limbo) puzzley platformer (like Limbo) and it held the record for first month sales on it's release (like Limbo). In fact, first month it also outsold both Castle Crashers and Trials HD... and where is it today sales wise? I can hear the "fizzle" already! :P
| mrstickball said:
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.
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Oh, I'm not trying to argue sales promotions and price drops drove most of these sustained sales (though they undoubtedly helped), it's just one component at play. It's also something I think Nintendo should take note of. There is a risk though, in that price instability can lead to a "race to the bottom" marketplace (iOS) or condition consumers to wait out price drops for non-AAA releases (Stream). As always, it's a balancing act.
Super Meat Boy debuted at a promotional discount rate btw, it's "MSRP" or whatever has always been 1200 points (and was announced as such beforehand).
| mrstickball said:
I wouldn't call ~50,000 units its first month a 'bomb'.
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In relation to Twisted Pixel's other platfomers on Live, I would. It was also part of the Games Feast promotion and it was only 40k in sales first month. Going to be a long crawl to even 100k at the rate it's going. :/
| mrstickball said:
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.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that dashboard visibility, brand tie-ins or price discounts alone are the sole promotional factors. Obviously a subpar product isn't going to get much external airtime, but Microsoft PR also works industry press pretty hard for coverage (their handling of and push for Shadow Complex was more significant than the treatment most retail games receive for example). Braid and Limbo were heavily pushed from this angle too (to great effect), but Microsoft uses press contacts for pretty much every game they publish, no matter how small scale. That includes even stuff like The Maw (which actually got a good amount of play for being one of the first 3D platformers on XBLA).
Big publishers like Capcom (DR Case Zero, MVC2, SSF2T, etc), Sega (Sonic 4, Virtual On, Vintage Collection, etc), Ubisoft (Scott Pilgrim, TMNT, etc) or whoever can afford to push their own content just fine, and they do the same regardless of platform. Advertising campaigns (from big budget television ads to viral networking through social circles) is always going to help sell product, there's nothing inherently unique about XBLA in that regard.
And the "Top Downloaded" chart is the last (or 5th) in line in the Arcade submenu btw. You actually have to go through two other menus to even get to it... it's really more like 1/10 the potential retail space on the dashboard for Arcade titles (which can even get front end "Featured" spots outside the Arcade area), and again the games in it have literally ALL been heavily featured elsewhere in promotional or ranking spots.
As bad as it can be for Arcade though, it's like paradise compared to the voodoo one has to perform to get to Indies. Of course I'm sure the sales there speak for themselves (;_;), but thank god MS has at least started actually promoting the content there. Some of the best games on 360 at all are Indies imo, Protect Me Knight was practically my 360 GOTY in 2010.
