The average budget for an Xbox Live Arcade game is probably pushing $750,000, up from $250,000 at the launch of the service, according to the former Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Xbox Live Arcade.
David Edery, who now runs consultancy firm Fuzbi, revealed the information in a presentation at the Digital Distribution Summit in Australia, reported by GameSetWatch. The figure was an estimate based on the way budgets had increased during his time at the company - up to $500,000 when he left in 2008, and rising as the games became more successful.
He also had some tips for digital game developers: make your pitch very short, know exactly who's going to buy the game, and don't trust unofficial sales figures.
"If you can't describe your game in a single sentence, than you have a problem," he said, adding that most pitches he received when working at Microsoft didn't say who the game was targeted at. He also said he received a lot of pitches for "card and board games" based on Carcassone having a high sales rank on VGChartz.com, but this overlooked the fact that these figures included free copies of the game and didn't represent high sales revenue.
He said that his sources indicated that Xbox Live Arcade was the biggest market for digitally distributed console games, leading Playstation Network and well ahead of Nintendo's WiiWare store.
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