Sep
12

Xbox Live Arcade is great for developers

Previously I mentioned how much I loved Xbox Live Arcade - it’s great for gamers. But XBLA is also great for developers.

Games can cost millions of pounds to make, with teams of 100 people taking 2 to 3 years. These games sell for £40-50 a shot. If you screw up, that’s a load of cash you’ve just wasted. Developing a game for Xbox Live Arcade can take under 6 months, and cost a only few hundred thousand dollars. With less financial risk involved, companies will be prepared to take more risks with games, trying out new IP and ideas.

With these massivley reduced costs, selling at a lower cost is realistic, and you can still make a healthy profit. You also have a delivery system that is pushing your content to the gamers, rather than getting a boxed product into a shop and hoping that someone notices it. I couldn’t find any hard numbers for XBLA sales, but someone has done some good estimating:

From: Randomly Generated

  • Frogger ($5 US) - 115,998 users = $580,000 in sales.
  • Bejeweled 2 ($10 US) - 115,466 users = $1,150,000 in sales.
  • Geometry Wars Evolved ($10 US) - 204,640 users = $2,046,000 in sales.
  • Uno ($10 US) - 180,703 users = $1,807,000 in sales.
  • Galaga ($5 US) - 43,560 users = $218,000 in sales.
  • Street Fighter II ($10 US) - 17,914 users = $180,000 in sales.

Geometry Wars has pulled in over $2 million in under a year. That’s a lot of cash for what is a fairly basic (but very good) game. At the time those stats were generated, I think Frogger had been out for about 3-4 weeks, and Street Fighter II has only been out for a week.

XBLA also pushes the move to digital distribution of games - Steam has already proved that this can work for the distribution of PC games, meaning slightly more profit for the developer and a cheaper end product for the consumer. In spite of all the Blu-Ray hype, Sony have already said they expect this to be last generation physical media based machines, and that the PlayStation 4 will likely be download only.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Gaming, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Xbox Live Arcade is great for developers”

  1. Dino Says:
    September 15th, 2006 at 9:44 am

    Geometry Wars is a bit of a flash in the pan I think; short-term, you can expect most titles to have a run of about 100,000 units on XBLA at $10 a pop, with $4 of that going to the publisher. That leaves a dev budget of about $600,000 which is hardly amazing - nice if you have a simple idea that you can bring to market quickly, but any moderately complex project will be struggling to make a profit from it.

    The way to go would appear to be to have a simple game that you can expand easily (offering more levels or different content) - users pay (say) 800 credits for the starter game, then 200 credits for incremental content which you can offer as much as you want of. This way, the user only pays what they want to, but there’s more profit to be squeezed from the game as a whole since you don’t have to incur the cost of the engine with each subsequent release.

  2. rick Says:
    September 15th, 2006 at 9:51 am

    Another XBLA thing is that for a load of those games there is a lot less work required - Zuma/Jewelquest/Frogger/Galaga/Street Fighter 2 - they’ve all alreadyn bee written and released on various platforms.

    They are just being repackaged, with acheievement hooks and online leaderboards etc. - all of which are more than likley drop in modules from microsoft (I know it’s not just simply a matter of downloading a bit of code, but you know what I mean)

  3. rsart - home of Rick Stirling, games artist, designer, egotist and raconteur » Blog Archive » Xbox live arcade probably is good for indie developers Says:
    September 23rd, 2006 at 1:34 am

    [...] 10 days ago I wrote that Xbox Live Arcade is great for developers. Since then Jeff Tunnell from Garage Games has written a post on his blog giving some more information, and hinting at figures and used Marble Blast Ultra as an example. [...]

Thoughts on this?