Comments on: Xbox Live Arcade is great for developers

By: rsart - home of Rick Stirling, games artist, designer, egotist and raconteur » Blog Archive » Xbox live arcade probably is good for indie developers

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 00:34:21 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: rick

rick — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:51:28 +0000

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)

By: Dino

Dino — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:44:33 +0000

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.