The Myths about Xbox Live Indie Game Development.

[Aiursrage2k]

It’s from 2012 but I thought it was a good or interesting article perhaps abit sobering. So the guy made a lot of money by making a mine raft clone with zombies

Hi my name is Thomas Steinke. I am the owner of DigitalDNA Games and I am an ex-pro game developer that now has become a full time Indie game developer. DigitalDNA Games is a company that has been making Xbox Live Indie Games exclusively for years now. We are also arguably the most successful developer on the system. If you are not familiar with us, here is our list of titles:

CastleMiner Z
CastleMiner
Avatar Connection
Avatar Superstar
Avatar Paintball
Avatar Laser Wars
Voice Changer 360
Avatar Snowball Fight
Avatar Avenue
Guitar Tuner 360
Avatar Aquarium
Avatar Alarm Clock
Audio Diagnostics
Ask Angela!
If you take a look at all time top selling Xbox Live Indie Games you will notice 5 of my games in the top 30; 3 in the top 10. My games CastleMiner and CastleMiner Z have broke records, holding the top selling slots for about a year, and have become the highest grossing franchise on XBLIG at over 1.5M units sold. In general, almost all of my games have either been #1 bestselling titles or at least top 5. Almost every game I have made has grossed at least a 5 figure return (even our first title “Avatar Avenue”). At one point we held 5 slots in the top 20 best selling games.

LIVE Activity for week of August 29th - Xbox Wire

The media seems to do a lot of disproportional coverage of XBLIG. They seem to skew coverage directed at developers that have not been successful, painting a dismal picture of XBLIG. After reading many of these articles, I am very surprised that the authors don’t seek information from some of the more successful developers on the system. I thought I would take some time to dispel some of the most common misconceptions about the system.

It seems to me that for a long time people have been gunning for XBLIG to fail for some reason. I have a theory about this. XBLIG is a very effective marketplace, where customer sales and game interest almost completely drive the success of a title on the system. Reviews and media coverage make almost no impact. I think this upsets a lot of people that have a more idealistic idea of how a marketplace should work and what titles should be successful. As a result they tend to gravitate towards people and stories that validate their perspective. The reality (possibly a sad one based on your particular perspective) is that the titles that the general population enjoy are usually not the ones that the critics appreciate. I think this idea sort of stabs at the hearts of people interested in “Indie” game development, where there is a romantic idea that the population is starving for a particular type of game.

This brings me to the first item on my list:

Myth #1: There is no money to be made on XBLIG.

It is true that the vast majority of games on the system make little to no money (I would estimate that probably 90% of games make less than $1000). The system is skewed toward the highest sellers, which enter a self propagating system where they get continuous exposure, based on sustained sales. Some people may argue that this is unfair, but I would argue that there really isn’t anything more democratic than a system that rewards developers based on consumer choices. Isn’t delivering what the consumer wants the goal of any good marketplace? Some people may argue this is “broken” but if you look at the data, I don’t think you will find anything unusual about this versus any other free marketplace, i.e. IOS.
Besides myself there are a lot of developers that have made a significant amount of money on the system. It is obvious to me that these developers “get it” and know what works on XBLIG and have chosen to be financially successful there. This is one of the common pitfalls that I see with developers on the system. When I talk to developers on the system that complain about sales, I usually ask “What made you think that title would be successful, i.e. was there a similar title that did well”?
when we pick titles, we do it based on careful market analysis. I often make this joke that I became Indie so that I could make the games I wanted, now I am just forced to make the games customers want. There is this romantic idea that you are going to make this game that you always wanted to, and people are going to love it. I love that idea myself, but ultimately you need to be realistic about market viability. There are a ton of titles I would LOVE to make, but I know that it will never happen, because I know they wouldn’t be successful, so in general I try to find a compromise between the two. All the successful developers on XBLIG have done this.
[/QUOTE]
Blogs recent news | Game Developer

[hippocoder]

You have to consider minecraft probably wasn’t on xbox during that time and now it is, his sales are rock bottom. Don’t try this at home, kids.

[MarigoldFleur]

@hippocoder

You have to consider minecraft probably wasn’t on xbox during that time and now it is, his sales are rock bottom. Don’t try this at home, kids.

I have an article from the same guy from this year. It tells a far more interesting and detailed story.

XBLIG was a great platform that got a bad rap but is also had a lot of serious problems. People have always been quick to chide XBLIG for being a cesspool of low quality fart apps, avatar games and Minecraft clones, but the problems ran much deeper than that. I am not going to sit here and say there weren’t low quality games on the system, but marketplaces like the ios app store have them as well and have been far more successful. So what was special about XBLIG?

Microsoft’s treated XBLIG as a second class citizen on the Xbox

I can sit here and tell you anecdotal information about insiders that I have talked to telling me about the friction that Microsoft had with an uncontrolled Indie system on the Xbox, but you don’t need to hear them to “get” that Microsoft never really embraced the idea of an open channel on their box. This relegated XBLIG to a corner of the marketplace which had a broad impact on the system as a whole. As time went on it seemed like XBLIG found itself in progressively more obscure places on the Xbox dashboard.

Around the same time, Apple was building one for the most successful digital marketplaces that ever existed on just that premise. To make an open market place on the Xbox really work like the AppStore, Microsoft would need to make EVERYTHING go through it. For example the next Call of Duty game would be released the exact same way your indie title would.

Deep inside, I sort of hoped that Microsoft was using XBLIG as an experiment with plans to eventually embrace this idea. You could see the obvious apprehension that Microsoft would have with this, and if I was talking about this in 2006 I would seem like a crazy person. However since then the Apple App store has illustrated that a free market actually works very well.

So why didn’t XBLIG turn into the next Apple Marketplace? The problem lies in that Microsoft needed to create a barrier between the “real” Xbox Live Marketplace and the indie one.

For people that may not be familiar with the game industry, getting a “real” game on the Xbox is a horrendous and monumentally expensive undertaking; one that isn’t really feasibly for an Indie developer. There are publishers involved, a lot of money, middle men and approval processes. So right away you see a problem. If you could just put game up on the Xbox for the $100 a year subscription fee, why would anyone ever NOT use that method to getting there game up there?

Microsoft solved this problem with pricing. The only available prices for games on XBLIG are $1, $3, $5. Right away by doing this they were prescribing a certain type of content on the system. The next state of the art $50 shooter just couldn’t be there. The next $20 XBLA game couldn’t even be there. There was only a certain type of game that could exist there. Immediately you then have a partition between expensive high quality games and cheap indie experiences.

It is worth saying at this point that although this was bad for the marketplace as a whole it was an amazing opportunity for indie developers. The problem with marketplaces like the AppStore is that you have to compete directly with the top tier developers/brands. Microsoft had successfully created a safe little “pond” where small indies could make tons of money on a real platform with 10’s of millions of users, without having to compete with the “big fish”. It was a gold mine. However, growing beyond these cheap experiences from a business standpoint becomes problematic.

To make the situation worse, Microsoft gave the most exposure to games that had the most unit sales, not gross sales, greatly disadvantaging higher priced titles. This drove the price of all the games on the system down to the lowest tier of $1 which became the de-facto price for an Indie game. It was a great disservice to the developers on the system and could have easily been avoided.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasSteinke/20130202/185921/

[tiggus]

What is the ballpark cost for a Unity xbox license? I imagine it must be expensive or they would list it alongside the Pro prices for all the other platforms.

Seems odd that Xbox is getting more Indie friendly with their own channel but you need a super expensive Unity license to develop for it, even if you are making a $1 title and not the next GTA.

[MasterSubby]

@tiggus

What is the ballpark cost for a Unity xbox license? I imagine it must be expensive or they would list it alongside the Pro prices for all the other platforms.

Seems odd that Xbox is getting more Indie friendly with their own channel but you need a super expensive Unity license to develop for it, even if you are making a $1 title and not the next GTA.

You can’t do XBIG in Unity. As for Any other titles, it’s roughly 40,000USD. You may get the Unity license free as a licensed dev, that’s how it is with all upcoming consoles. This is packaged with the dev kits.

Not sure exact pricing but XBIG registration is or was 100 dollars a year. But they have discontinued further development with XNA.

Things are getting cheaper though for everyone, and more open as the future unfolds.

[tiggus]

@MasterSubby

You can’t do XBIG in Unity.

…

Not sure exact pricing but XBIG registration is or was 100 dollars a year. But they have discontinued further development with XNA.

Ah ok thank you for the clarification. That’s too bad as it seems like it would be quite fun to be able to port pet projects to the “big screen” in the living room.

[DanielQuick]

@tiggus

Ah ok thank you for the clarification. That’s too bad as it seems like it would be quite fun to be able to port pet projects to the “big screen” in the living room.

There’s always the OUYA if you’re into that.

[MarigoldFleur]

@DanielQuick

There’s always the OUYA if you’re into that.

Not worth the time or effort.

[TylerPerry]

@MarigoldFleur

Not worth the time or effort.

They didn’t say anything about money though… if they want their game on a TV then the Ouya is the way to go, just don’t expect to become rich from it.

[MarigoldFleur]

@TylerPerry

They didn’t say anything about money though… if they want their game on a TV then the Ouya is the way to go, just don’t expect to become rich from it.

Don’t expect to make any money from it. Expect it to actually lose the equivalent of how much money you could have made looking in to porting to any other platform. The Ouya is a money pit with likely less than 100,000 activated consoles in the wild.

[im1]

nice thread

too bad about xna

i really liked it when it started