Hey guys, I figured the community here would be interested to know that the complete sales data for our game Avatar Showdown is available here on our site, updated every day (usually). This game was the #1 selling Xbox Live Indie Game for its first month and still floating around in the top 5, so this gives a good look at how the platform is doing.

It also inspired Mommy's Best Games to do the same with Shoot1Up.

Both those games are a dollar. We get 70% of that, Microsoft takes 30.

And here's some sales data for the top 20 games of 2009, for comparison.

What do you think?

I'd say that selling games for $1 is crazy low, and that its not a really feasible model for anyone outside of student/developers.

I mean, selling 50k units of a game looks to be great, as Avatar Showdown is one of the better selling games on XBCG..But at the same time, its maybe enough money to pay 1 fulltime developer, no?

Well depends. Really I could live off just 10-15k a year, and even less than that if I didn't have student loans to pay. Same goes for Jonny (our programmer), so this could be enough to support us going full-time, especially considering it's only the first 2 months of revenue (these games have a much longer tail if they stay on the top downloads list, compared to retail games). But still, we're not gonna start our studio and go full-time till our next game is released (it will be $3-5), and/or Jonny's done with school.

And hey, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 sold over 200k units in about 7 months, so that could definitely support at least 2 full-time developers.

But yeah, for bigger teams it's probably not feasible (the platform), but for teams of 1-3 it can definitely work, no matter what they charge, especially if they release on PC too (very little porting work with XNA).

To be fair, though, the successes on XBCG are somewhat far and wide between.

For example, the creator of Shoot1Up (Nathan Fouts), whom I speak to often, didn't do too hot with Weapon of Choice, which he put a lot of time & resources into.

Yes, there are some developers that have done fantastic with the platform like I MAED a GAM3, which sold very well...But that was the undisputable #1 game of the entire platform by a wide margin. Compare that to something like XBLA, which the top developer made about 50 times more money in the same period with a much smaller dev team (comparatively to earnings), and you may see what I'm getting at - that its not a sustainable market place for a lot of devs. Yes, it may support 10-20 good-selling games, but that isn't great compared to other markets, like XBLA, PSN, WiiWare, or mobile markets.

Yeah I agree that XBIG can't compete with the other platforms in terms of sales...not sure about Wiiware though. Also not sure about the iphone since there's so much more competition, it might be easier to make money on XBIG than from there. But I dunno.

And yeah that does suck about WoC, certainly would have made a whole lot more on XBLA...

mrstickball, obviously your company tracks XBLA sales amright? Whatever it is, arent majority of the these developers doing it part time, so any profit they make is worth it isnt it?

What game is better I made a game with zombies in it or ZA which is on sale this week?

sorry double post :(

Yes, I'd imagine that most are doing XNA games part time. However, one has to understand the economics of it:

Chances are, if you want to make a game for XBCG, your going to put in at least 6 months of full-time work to build the game. Those 6 months of work do invariably translate into money, or the lack of it (as you could of been doing something else with the time to make money). If the return on that time isn't very high, then it would be difficult to justify continued releases on the platform...Making it not very viable as a serious platform for developers...Compare that to other platforms like XBLA, and the potential revenues even for a part-time team are many multiples higher, making it more viable, in most scenarios.

Fair enough, but arent they doing this more for what itll mean for their portfolios rather than the money, which as weve seen in this case isnt so bad?

Its obvious now that the expected quality for XBLA games has been hugely boosted by MS, Indie Games is giving those who got shut out a chance to have their work seen.