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In-Depth: Xbox 360 Community Games Devs Talk Successes, Failures, What They Want
by Patrick Klepek [PC, Console/PC]
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April 1, 2009
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Has Microsoft's Xbox 360-based Xbox Live Community Games service been a success? That's the question on everyone's mind, following the anxiously awaited release of sales data to developers.
The answer: it depends who you talk to. There have been successes and failures in the Community Games marketplace, with hard lessons being learned by both developers hinging their futures on the service and Microsoft as a platform holder.
It's been four months since Microsoft launched Community Games, an independent games focused compliment to Xbox Live Arcade fueled by games created with the company's free-to-download XNA Games Studio software.
During these four months, however, developers have had no idea how well (or poorly) their games are selling, the only metric being Major Nelson top-ten lists or user created leaderboards.
The numbers are finally in. The first response came from what many believed was an early success story, trippy side-scroller Weapon of Choice from ex-Insomniac Games developer Nathan Fouts and his studio Mommy's Best Games.
"The results are, in one word, sobering," said Fouts on his developer blog. "I left one of the best video game employers to strike out and make my own games. This is my full time job, I am not a hobbyist and Weapon of Choice shows that. It is a full-fledged game, which took a full year to make. Not only did we hope sales would recoup the savings we spent during the year of development, we hoped it would provide enough financing to support the development of our next game."
Fouts expected Weapon of Choice to fall into one of three sales categories. 30,000 more was a hit, 20,000 or more was acceptable and 10,000 or less was disappointing. Weapon of Choice sold fewer than 10,000 copies, but Fouts told Gamasutra his game was downloaded roughly 130,000 times.
Though Fouts wouldn't disclose the game's specific numbers, let's assume Weapon of Choice sold 10,000 copies. That's a conversion rate -- which tracks if a consumer downloaded a demo and then purchased the full game -- of almost 8%.
Is that low? The developer of Word Soup, one of Community Games' biggest winners in its first four months, doesn't think so. A conversion rate that high is fantastic, actually.
Word Soup co-creator and Fuzzy Bug co-founder Scott Newby told us the traditional conversion rate with PC casual or indie downloadable games can be as low as 1%. Word Soup, which was downloaded 46,405 times and sold 9,153 copies, produced an impressive conversion rate of near 20% and generated roughly $32,000 for Fuzzy Bug.
By comparison, in 2007, Microsoft disclosed that Xbox Live Arcade games experienced a 17% demo-to-full game conversion rate -- though that rate is believed to have dropped significantly since then.
Weapon of Choice was downloaded almost three times as many times as Word Soup. Both games were released at the same price point: 400 Microsoft Points ($5). There may be an explanation for the discrepancy between the download numbers.
"Our title and screen shot is quite descriptive so most people would know what they’re getting when they download the trial," said Newby.
One difference between a developer finding happiness on Community Games and wondering if they gambled incorrectly may depend on the scale of their project.
Ska Studios' founder James Silva, the one-man-army behind this week's The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai on XBLA, treated Community Games as side projects and come out very profitable. Between ZSX4 Guitarpocalypse and ZP2K9, an experiment in multiplayer programming, Silva has come away with roughly $9,000.
"A lot of small studios are pretty mad about sales," he told us. "I would be too if I'd rented an office suite, hired programmers, artists, and a PR chick, and was looking at a few thousand in sales. However, since my costs are just... rent... I'm pretty happy... For a small studio, [Community Games] is sure to be a letdown, but for a guy coding in his pajamas (mine are chef's pants still, in fact, I'm wearing them right now), it's awesome."
Silva may highlight a central issue with Community Games at the moment. Some, like Fouts, left their jobs and took a risk with Community Games. It offered a chance to move around some of the headaches that come with publishing on XBLA and direct games straight to the consumer. But it's a new service with its own set of growing pains and perhaps not yet ready to support yearlong development cycles.
"My advice for developers would be to try and keep the development costs down if they can," explained Newby. "We only committed a couple of weeks to the project so we're happy with what we've recouped –- if we'd spent several months we’d be less happy. Developers should have an idea now based on the selection of sales figures on how games can fare. I'd use this as a rule of thumb for now and if you’re going to set off to spend a year writing a massive RPG I wouldn't expect hundreds of thousands back."
Developers have come away from the first four months of Community Games with some hard lessons, but that's not to say Microsoft doesn't have work to do, either. Many developers have had public issues with Microsoft's treatment of the service, starting with the lack of sales information. If Microsoft had released sales data earlier, they argue, more would have understood the realities of Community Games.
With that issue in the past, however, there's more work to be done. Of the many Community Game developers we talked to, there were two very common requests.
1. Better visibility on the Xbox Live interface
"Look, my old gaming friend just got a 360," said Fouts. "His first mission was to buy Weapon of Choice. He couldn’t. That’s right, he couldn’t find it. He’s a normal gamer, and he simply couldn’t find Community Games at all. Eventually he did in a really silly way (had to go through the Guide button!) but that’s just absurd."
2. Let users rate the products, a la iTunes
"Frankly speaking, Community Games is flooded with games, and in the future it'll be a ocean of games," said Colosseum developer and Shortfuse Games CEO Johan Hermeren, whose $10 game sold just over 4,000 copies but saw user downloads of over 120,000.
"Also, the quality differs a lot. In that kind of situation it's pretty important to guide the gamers to buy the games that they really want to buy, and I believe that a rating system is way to go."
Microsoft isn't yet saying much about the response developers are having yet.
"Sales and expectations vary from developer to developer," said XNA developer marketing manager Lisa Sikora in an e-mailed statement. "Although this is still a very early snapshot of the Community Games sales potential, we’re finding that several of our top sellers will be taking home almost as much income from four months of sales as the average U.S. citizen earns in a full year. We at Xbox are very proud of offering a direct distribution channel to developers."
"We’re confident that this business will only continue to grow as more and more Xbox 360 owners explore the channel and discover its gems," she continued. "We’re always looking for ways to improve the consumer experience, but we don’t have anything new to announce at this time."
It's also worth remembering Community Games is only four months old. The New Xbox Experience hasn't seen a cosmetic facelift since its launch, a move that could drastically help exposure for Community Games releases. Plus, despite all the talk of doom and gloom for Community Games, it's also creating awareness for them.
Developers aren't giving up on the service yet, either.
"All in all, I believe that both these figures are correlated with a too hefty priced Colosseum, and that [Community Games] is new to people," said Hermeren. "Still, we at Shortfuse think that Community Games is a good thing though. XNA is awesome, low entry barriers for indies are awesome, the 360 is awesome."
The question isn't whether Community Games has been a successor or not, it's what developers chose to do with the service, now aware of its heights and limitations.
[Gamasutra sister site GamerBytes has been leading the collation and analysis of Xbox Live Community Games sales data, and a recent Gamasutra cross-posted story has much more context on the service's first public data.]
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Get some trailers on gametrailers.com (it's free). Find a way to get gametrailers, ign, gamespot, etc, to review your game.
Sadly, hype seems to sell more games than quality these days.
A number of developers have tried to publicise their games, but have noted very little benefit from it. Weapon of Choice is a prime example: it's sophisticated, polished and has been picked up by sites like Eurogamer (and physical magazines like X360 Magazine UK), but this hasn't translated into sales.
Equally, the 8-minute trial is not suitable for a lot of games - but I can understand why MS have implemented this, as trying to get "amateur" developers to implement a functional trial mode into their XBCG releases would be tricky.
The key is visibility (or lack thereof) of XBCG on XNA: as it stands, XBCG have to compete with XBLA, XBox games, Videos, DLC, full-game demos and a raft of game/movie promotions. There isn't any real reason for non-hardcare games to come rummage in XBCG: there's simply too much elsewhere!
Conversely, if Microsoft do promote XBCG more, they run a real risk of sales cannibalisation: XBCG can essentially be viewed as offering cheap, coffee-break games to the masses: some may be good and some may be bad, but they're all substantially cheaper than XBLA games - and as Apple's App store has shown, cheap impulse buys generally win over more expensive releases, even if the more expensive titles have demonstrably higher quality.
The attach rate for XBCG seem reasonable (if towards the low end): what is disappointing is the demo uptake. The sales figures shown so far show an average of 25'000 downloads - this is less than 10% of the average XBLA release (350'000 in the first month, according to Wikipedia).
The question is how do Microsoft view XBCG? Is it just a low-end sales channel, an attempt to offer "indie" credentials, a breeding ground for new IP/talent or just a "product differentiator" to keep the Wii and PS3 at bay?
It may have been launched with good intentions, but with high numbers of titles, low volumes of sales and low profit margins, it'll be interesting to see where Microsoft go next.
We released the game Exhaust and it didn't sell that well (though it was more of a test project for our next game). We hope that XBCG will get better and larger in the following month since we will release our second game "Penalty of Heroes" in this fall (Aug/Sep) on XBCG.
The rating system is a good idea. We also want some changes with the demo time. We would like the player to be able to play the first level as much as they like with out the time pressure
I like part of what you said, but I do have issues with one comment.:
"Weapon of Choice is a prime example: it's sophisticated, polished and has been picked up by sites like Eurogamer (and physical magazines like X360 Magazine UK), but this hasn't translated into sales"
We don't actually have the numbers for Weapon of Choice. All we know is that it was not enough for the developer to make a living and fund his next game. The marketing probably gave it several times the sales it would have gotten otherwise (as many of the XBCG numbers are extremely low), so while it hasn't turned out to be a possible career path yet, the marketing probably still helped immensely.
I still have hope, though. Flash games weren't much of a career path when they first hit, and they're as saturated with shovelware as much as XBCG ever will be. When community games are widely known and accepted and a few more good ones get released, it may become possible to make a career out of them.
It would be smart for Microsoft to list all the XBCG automatically sorted by average quality rating. Once the quality titles are filtered to the top of the list their success would serve as positive reinforcement for new developers to focus more on quality and in turn raise the bar on all titles.
(oh, and a plug for Biology Battle! Pretty sweet!)
The article says that Weapon of Choice sold fewer than 10,000 copies.
Kim Pallister:
I like the idea of adding achievements to community games, the problem with that is that you'd probably end up with a lot of community games adding easy to obtain achievements so that people will just spend $5 to pick up an easy 200 achievement points. Since Microsoft doesn't monitor community games (I think?) I'm sure this would become a huge problem.
There's a lot of talk about what distributors can do for developers, but I haven't seen much talk about what they can do for themselves. Were there sustained, targeted campaigns for these community games? Or were sales performance expectations unrealistically high for the effort and resources invested into marketing these titles? Most products don't sell themselves well.
It could be argued that expecting higher sales would be optimistic, given the nature of XBCG. One possible way forward would be for Microsoft to transfer popular titles across to XBLA (with achievements and possibly extra content) - if nothing else, it would be interesting to contrast and compare the sales figures.
As it stands, XBCG is firmly in the "amateur experimentation only" camp - though whether that's a bad thing or not is firmly in the eye of the beholder...
But see, the difference is that the popular xbla arcade games have more hype before release. Those games are also reviewed by Gametrailers, ign, gamespot, etc. If us cg developers want to sell games, we have to get reviews on those websites. 8 minute trail isn't enough to make someone want to buy a game, but if they read a review that says that game is worth every penny, then the conversion rate will increase.
I still think the 4 minute trail is what killed Weapons of Choice.
My only disagreement was that the marketing didn't help. Yes, I know it sold fewer than 10,000 copies, but that could be 9,999 or 3,000 (big difference).
What we do know is that Weapon of Choice had 130,000 trial downloads which is about 4 times what the highest of the games listed in the previous article had, so to me, that's proof that the marketing worked.
Really, Weapon of Choice's weakness was that it didn't have all that great of a conversion rate compared to several of those listed, meaning that either:
1. Andrew is right and the trial was a poor representation of the game.
2. Weapon of Choice, despite being a higher production game, just isn't that good.
Having not played it, I don't know which of these (or perhaps some of both) it is, but my original point still stands: Marketing helped a ton.