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Reality check
17-02-2011, 09:31 PM
Post: #2
RE: Reality check
(17-02-2011 04:40 PM)Stuart Wrote:  The following provides some up to date figures regarding Xbox Live Indie game sales. Indie games sell at either $1/3/5 price points but the $1 games are far and away the most successful as you can imagine.

Unfortunately you will notice from the figures below that the potential for us to make anything other than pocket money developing for this platform is unlikely.

The best selling game of all time on Xbox Live Indie is – ‘I Maed a Gam3 with Zombies!!!1’ which has sold a total of 52059 copies since its launch. This is an average of 2892 games per month which in turn is $34804 per year, after Microsoft takes its cut and we convert to GBP we get £15’061 profit for the year.

As you are aware there are 11 of us and by the time we pay what we need in terms of office space, hardware, licenses, tax, spam etc we would be left with a couple of hundred each per year (assuming we were the number one selling game!!!).

The current chart leader is – ‘Baby maker extreme’ with 9794 total sales and after the above calculation this works out at £8499 per year which you may notice is half the above.

Things get worse when move to the realm of puzzle games, which is what we are currently making for this platform. There are no puzzle games in the top 30 best selling Xbox Indie games. The two best selling Indie puzzle games are very obviously aimed at the young females. The number one selling puzzle game has some crazy Japanese name which I cant translate but has total sales of 1589 copies which works out at £1333 per year profit and the second best selling puzzle game is – ‘Cassies Corner’ with 3057 total sales which works out at £930 profit per year.

We would of coarse be hoping to release more than one title per year but if you look at the example of Radian Games (one of the few indie developers providing full data) who released 4 games in the space of 7 months and only made a profit of £9722 for all games you will see that Xbox Indie is not the way to go.

Basically we are not going to make money selling a game on the Xbox unless we pay up for a full license, which we can’t, afford.

Sorry to scare you all but for Causeway Games to operate successfully we need to be selling upwards of £250’000 worth of games per year, and that is giving us all a pretty low salary.

If we are serious about making this into a business and going full time we need to make a game that has the potential to give us a major cash injection and the only platform I can see that has this potential and that is also within our price range to develop for is the iPhone.

Either that or a combination of iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile.
iPhone would potentially make the most money however the issue is that an intel mac is required to develop. I think we should take advantage of the new deal between Microsoft and Nokia as a new wave of Windows based Nokia handsets will soon be out and I would guess that it is similar to code for Windows mobile as for Xbox as they are both Microsoft.


Good work Stuart, certainly makes informative if sobering reading. I dont suppose you found any figures showing what the top selling genres are on i-phone did you?

I am still not disheartened by this. I think from this point on we ought to view XBLA as a portfolio and publicity building tool rather than a purely cash making one. If we have a past history of console development it should look very favourably among publishers especially if they have already heard of us before we approach them.

Thomas Gray - Chairman and Lead Designer Causeway Games
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Messages In This Thread
Reality check - Stuart - 17-02-2011, 04:40 PM
RE: Reality check - Thomas - 17-02-2011 09:31 PM
RE: Reality check - Rodney - 17-02-2011, 09:50 PM
RE: Reality check - Rodney - 18-02-2011, 01:30 AM
RE: Reality check - Stuart - 18-02-2011, 10:57 AM
RE: Reality check - Ryan Brown - 18-02-2011, 06:41 PM
RE: Reality check - Stuart - 18-02-2011, 08:35 PM

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