It’s been an interesting couple of days for the community games with the sales figures finally released and well, I wasn’t going to go there. We’ve still got a backlog of reviews to get through after all, but given the flood of emails I’ve received today I guess, well, we’re going there!
If you’re looking for some detailed analysis, then please take a look over at the ever excellent Gamerbytes analysis posted earlier today. Ryan’s done a top job of gathering together stats and figures and even has a nice little graph. We like graphs.
In short, for those who’ve not been paying attention – the sales figures are bad for some people and good for others. I can’t say I’m personally especially surprised by the figures overall. Sure there’s a couple of ones that boggle my mind (Rumble Massage – wha?) but fair play to the developers who’ve made a pretty penny from the seemingly obtuse. If folks want the freedom to develop anything under the sun (within reason) and put it in front of a large audience, then right now, the CC seems like a perfectly reasonable place to do so.
And I guess this is the key point. It’s easy to focus on the negatives here, it’s easy to come out decrying Microsoft for not doing all that they should, but if the right game in the right place can make a few grand in only a couple of weeks then surely this means that the CC is a viable route for independents. A result of over $32,000 may not be the best for someone with a large development budget, but $5,000 for one guy in his bedroom for a couple of weeks work? How can that be a bad thing? Surely this is why the CC exists?
Yes, there’s some figures that disappoint – Duotrix’ poor performance makes me pull a sad face, it’s a wonderful game (and it’s nice of Mo to start breaking down some stats – more graphs! Woo!) but overall, they’re promising figures that bode well for the future of community games. For an unprecedented move (I don’t count Net Yaroze) of allowing legitimate homebrew a place on consoles and to then place that in front of a massive audience of people, it’s good stuff.
This isn’t the death knell of community games or a disaster in the making, this is only the beginning of something great. Let’s not underplay the achievement of those who’ve made a complete unknown a pretty darn fine success all told.
It might not have been the goldmine some were hoping for, but man, the XNA Community Games channel is in rude health. That’s something to be proud of.
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I think things don’t look all that good, but not necessarily all of the results are astounding. Bad games aren’t going to do well, and the majority of developers shouldn’t expect big returns. But, the part that worries me is on the other end, the cream of the crop. Usually I would say that 5 grand is a decent return for an average game, but if the game is high on the popularity list it gets more concerning because it’s the upper boundary. Not enough people even look at community games to make those “runaway hits” that games like Solar or WoC should be. I’m working on my own game right now and I know that even simple concepts can take a fair amount of time to fully implement, and with community games we see the most successful people still going through the ringer over their efforts.
I think that the service can be improved, either by developers or by MS offering more functionality, or by review sites such as this one showcasing which games deserve more mass attention, but right now it’s a dangerous market.
The problem with sites like xnPlay is that they don’t generate more awareness for CG. The people that come here know CG exists, the problem is that most Xbox Live users don’t know – or don’t care. But I guess if you don’t care you would’ve at least downloaded one game. Trial downloads of the launch titles suggest that it’s really lack of exposure. The XNA demos in February 2008 obviously were a big hit and generated quite some media feedback. Yet the launch was completely overshadowed by NXE. And the fact that Microsoft offered an XBLA contract to The Dishwasher, which was the most popular of the XNA demo titles, surely won’t help CG. If that game still would be released as a CG the service would get the attention it desperately needs.
But you still have to think about the things that might be too annoying for people to bother with CG:
- lack of quality control
- internet connection required to start the games
- lack of leaderboards
- lack of achievements
A game like Carneyvale Showtime would be an instant hit on XBLA at 400 points. On CG it sold about 3,000 copies (judging by the numbers of Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp, which entered the top 10 at the same time). So it’s either the four things above or it’s simply not knowing CG exists. All of these are things only Microsoft can change.
MS Research is still going to release Kodu on XBLCG and that game gained quite a bit of attention which should help XBLCG as a whole.
RE the quality control: the only remotely workable thing is user/player ratings – which I imagine to be far more complex than assumed by the general audience.
The other three points won’t be addressed by MS as it would dimmish the value of XBLA and put the XBLCG reviewers into the position of facing the same amount of work as the XBLA reviewers without any compensation.
I’m not sure how many people are aware of how limited the market is for XBLCG. As there’s a very small number of countries allowed to download titles, even with a decent amount of press, there will still be a smaller number of sales than there could be.
Ideally Microsoft how begin to open it up to allow more people to actually download and play them, which might also go and help out with getting more sales for everyone (at least beyond the quality issues, which allowing ratings would *really* help with)…
Au contraire, the market ist big. There are 13 million Xbox Live users in the Community Games territories. Yet the game with the most trial downloads seems to be Star Gaming’s Blackjack. 68,000 over three months with various updates (and each update counts as a new download). I wouldn’t be surprised if 12,8 million of the potential customers have yet to take a first look at CG. But IIRC XBLA had a pretty weak start as well. The success started with the release of UNO and Texas Hold’Em, I think UNO came seven months after the launch, Texas Hold’Em (which was free for a couple of days) ten months after launch of XBLA.
From 17 million total Live! users, there’s an average attach rate of 6 or 7 games for XBLA (last figures I could find, if there’s any new or updated I’d love it if folks could link me up to them). That’s a good attach rate but it’s also good for putting things in perspective.
This isn’t a technical problem, folks. You can advertise the hell out of things on the dash, put a button on the dash in big neon letters etc…, it’ll help a bit – but it’s not going to counter the fact that only 70% of Xbox 360 owners use Live and have downloaded an arcade game (an being the operative word here).
It won’t make most of the issues go away.
For that, you’re going to have to institute a change in peoples attitudes and that, really truly, is out of MS hands. If they can’t make everyone buy incredibly large amounts of XBLA games, they certainly can’t do it for Pong. And that’s where developers have to pick up the reigns and get out there, promoting stuff.
For a niche within a niche within a niche, which is precisely what the CG is, and more so for a completely untried and untested market – these figures are excellent.
We don’t do too badly for helping the awareness along really. Not hyper amazing, but I *know* that the site gets read by people who can and do help get the word out to more mainstream outlets. We don’t exist in a void down here, that’s for sure. If that part of things wasn’t working, honestly, I wouldn’t still be doing it – there’d be little to no point.
The thing is, you can either sit there moping, blaming Microsoft or wishing to high heaven for a miracle or you can get out there and do something about it. If you stop and think, what Nathan did this morning with his press release is something that everyone should have been doing. He’s generated a shitload of exposure for himself and y’know, that’s a bloody good thing. There’s *nothing* stopping anyone else doing the same.
Why wait for press outlets to find you? Go forth, find them. We’ll do our bit, Microsoft do their bit, Ryan, Simon, Tim and Michael over at the Think! corner of things do theirs, Eurogamer do their bit. It’s up to the devs to push further beyond that.
Sure, there’s things Microsoft can do to raise exposure and by all accounts, they’re contemplating the where to next themselves, but ultimately – they’re just distributors and every single developer on the service has the power to raise not just their own profiles but the profiles of the CC in general. It takes work and it can pay off.
Get a submission to Indiecade in. Get a submission into the next IGF. Take into account what the succesful devs are doing. Fire off emails (and not press releases) and sell your games. Establish a web presence, establish your name. Don’t wait for other people to do it for you.
I’m sorry but I for one am not surprised at all by this for the simple fact that Microsoft REALLY DROPPED THE BALL by omitting the automatic download feature in the NXE.
I can almost without a shadow of a doubt guarantee that the trial downloads would be a LOT higher which would in turn translate into many more sales.
Not many people, especially casual browsers of CG could be bothered manually going through every single title and downloading the trial because there are a SHIT LOAD.
It took me about a week of solid bursts of downloading a day just so I could keep my sanity but still grab all CGs has to offer when I first jumped in. But guess what, if it magically just appeared on their HDDs most people would give it a bash.
That’s not to say that all games would have more sales but the gems, the ones worthy of more sales, would definitely have more sales.
I honestly don’t know what on earth they were thinking when instead of making it even better by having it include CGs, they decided to remove it entirely costing the XBLA and CG developers sales.
Just shooting randomly here, but maybe MiscroSoft knew all along that having lots of downloads breaks the NXE, so they removed the auto downloads to buy themselves some time to find a work-around.
Or maybe I’m just getting increasingly irritated at having to wait two minutes for my menus to come up.
And that’s the least of my problems. If I want to download stuff I can go to xbox.com and it’s way faster than the Live marketplace. The thing that annoys me the most is how long it takes to populate the “My Games” list. With 120+ XBLA/XBLCG games I have to wait 30+ seconds whenever I exit a game and want to start a new game. For XBLA there is a workaround, simply press the Guide and enter the quick launch list, your newest XBLA games are there. But CG aren’t. Obviously the 360 was never designed with such a big library in mind, there’s absolutely no caching, everything has to be loaded from the start.
The marketplace suffers from something similar but yet totally different. It could be super fast – but then it wouldn’t be able to tell you which games you already bought. Actually that’s the way it was when NXE was released but people were complaining why they were told that they had to pay 800 points again and so Microsoft threw in the quick n dirty fix that now checks your complete download history before drawing the marketplace. And there too is no caching involved, so everytime you go to the marketplace the process repeats and with every download your history gets longer and the whole process of browsing through the marketplace gets slower. But I guess these are things that won’t be fixed for Xbox 360, we’ll have to wait for the next generation. Xbox Live became much more of a success than Microsoft ever anticipated, they designed their download histories with a marketplace of a couple of thousand downloadable items in mind. Now we’re already at 100,000+ items.
I can’t believe how bad NXE is considering all the hype it generated. Its sole purpose seems to be to thrust as many adverts in my face as possible (not Community Games ones obviously) at the expense of usability.
It’s strange that these adverts are constantly updated and appear instantly, yet my games list, stuff already sitting on my machine, takes so long to populate.
Priorities eh.
I’m with Ste Pickford on this that NXE opening straight to adverts instead of “my Xbox stuffage” is pretty brazenly offensive.
Just a few thoughts: Auto-download of random stuff to the users HDD has quite a few consequences: there are still capped internet connections out there and the 360′s HDD space is on the sparse side of things. Making the user delete stuff off his property instead of deciding what to add won’t help the reputation of the channels.
Well, aye, but Auto Downloads was never mandatory. It was just something you could use if you wanted to.
Exactly, you would only use it if you had the space, which a lot more people have these days, and the want, which a lot of CG enthusiasts would with the multitude of titles and more and more coming all the time.
I never suggested it should be mandatory.
It should just be there for the (tonnes of) people who want to use it.
That would be great for those of us who check out every game…but most people aren’t even aware of XBCG to begin with. This is the biggest issue this service faces. I can understand MS not wanting to spend money on advertising this…so I can’t blame them.
That’s what I don’t understand. They obviously are putting in more money for support and the whole Creator’s Club than they currently can get back by selling premium memberships and community games. So why would they want to spend money on it but not want to advertise it? I don’t think it’s got something to do with pressure from XBLA developers. Almost all developers so far are complaining about the way XBLA works, that MS has too much power, they have no idea when their games will be released, there’s an extra long waiting queue, Microsoft decides prices and takes a big share in revenues … the list goes on and on. If you’re on XBLA you’re pretty much a pawn, so no way do developers put pressure on Microsoft not to promote CG.
Maybe they see it as some kind of open beta at the moment, they simply don’t want everybody to come here until they ironed out the bugs and flaws in the system. Maybe they are aware of the quality problem. After all if you spend money on bringing new customers to CG and they leave due to the quality you probably will never ever get them back. It’s all about first impressions. So my guess is that they will continue to enhance useability and accessability of CG and once those things are working they’ll start to advertise. Automatic update messages (not automatic updates, which is a good thing, see below) and ratings will be the next steps.
So why are automatic updates not a good thing for CG? Because of the design of Xbox 360. Any 360 can only store 3 updates at once. When you start the 4th game the oldest update is deleted (if of course there’s an update available for the game). With the overall shorter game time of CG you would be asked for an update pretty much every couple of minutes. And that would be much more annoying than having to download the game again.
I think you’re right. Also considering that MS has yet to advertise XBLA, which I think they should have been doing years ago…they would have to address that before advertising XBCG.
Apple has done an excellent job promoting their app store. To the point where my 360 owning friends (95% of which are not aware of XBCG to begin with, and 80% are not aware of XBLA) know all about it despite not owning the iPhone or iPod Touch.
XBLA’s library is diverse and full of high quality content, enough to warrant a marketing push. Pretty soon, XBCG will get to that point.
I have faith though. There will be a day where XBCG gets a game like fl0w, Flower, Braid, etc. An artsy game that is unconventional but appreciated. The day that occurs, the mainstream gaming media will jump on it and provide a lot of advertising for the service.
[...] XNPlay [...]
Well, Braid would take around 100k in costs to make (ie. a pro level programmer/artist working for the time that they were working on it). That’s the case with many “great” niche games. And when you’re returning 30k at BEST on a service, well, that’s just not a feasible investment.
You might get a labor of love from a college kid or someone with enough income that he can spend 12 hours a day working on a game instead of, well, working, but for the most part, you’re going to get the smaller, flawed titles that people keep complaining about, just because that’s all that’s feasible to make on there. And that’s the chicken/egg situation that we run into.
But the CC isn’t meant to be a place where you can get on the 360 bypassing cert fees etc… which is what you’re essentially attempting if trying to make a game on a large budget for it. That’s XBLA market stuff and that’s got its own fair share of problems for getting a ROI (see Si Carless’ GDC talk for some educated but likely not far from accurate guesses).
If folks barrelled in expecting a gold mine and a way to get themselves set up whilst avoiding the costs of the big daddy service and then didn’t get that, that’s not necessarily a problem with the system. More one of perception (and not on the customers part).
And by you, I mean a nebulous you, of course. Not anyone personally