[In this editorial and analysis, console digital download site GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley looks at sales for Xbox Live Indie Games in 2009, with real data on how the top games are performing and a conclusion that the Xbox 360 service is becoming a much more promising way to get your hobbyist title out there and seen by console gamers.]
For a good while now, we’ve been talking about the Xbox Live Indie Games scene. It had a bit of a rough beginning but since we’ve seen numerous additions to the service – a ratings system, Avatar support, an entirely new name, and new pricing tiers. Finding the sweet spot for hobbyist and user-submitted indie games has been a long process, but there’s definitely been some progress.
Major Nelson may have released the Top 20 XBL Indie games for 2009, but it’s thanks to the participants of the official XNA forums — including many of the developers — that we have sales data for their games over the year, and thus a much clearer picture.
The below graph shows the sales of the games, the amount of trial versions of the game that were downloaded, the conversion percentage from trial to sale, the price and the money made by the developer itself. The money made by a developer on any XBLIG game is 70% of its selling price – Microsoft picks up 30% of each sale:
The Win Of ZOMBIES!
It’s not much of a surprise to see James Silva’s GAM3 W1TH ZOMB1ES become the top selling game of the year. It’s an incredibly simple game, but also follows numerous traits of the top tier Indie games – a bizarre style, a weird song and a priced super cheap. All of these points brought the game to the attention of gamers and game blogs everywhere – Kotaku, Joystiq, and many major news sutes mentioned it. And it had a personality, alongside being a pretty decent game.
[You can read the full article over at GamerBytes Here.]
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