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Xbox Live Indie Games Struggle For Profitability
An article at the Opposable Thumbs blog examines the Xbox Live Indie Games economy, finding that developers are having trouble making enough money to justify continued work with the platform. Quoting:
"If you want to publish a console video game, there's no easier route than the Xbox Live Indie Games program. But while it's relatively easy to get your game on the service, it's hard to get it noticed. There's a lot of junk on XBLIG, so much so that a group of developers banded together at the end of last year to promote quality indie titles. There have been success stories—like the recently released FortressCraft, which managed to sell 16,000 units on the day of release—but they're not exactly common. So with virtually no promotion, and with average earnings of just $3,800 per title, why do developers continue to create games for the platform? ...virtually all of the developers we spoke to are considering moving on from the platform. But all seem to view their experience as valuable, which in the end is part of the point of XBLIG: it's a place where virtually anyone can make a game that can be played on a console. Devs just need to know what they're getting into."
The whole purpose of the Indie game scene on the Xbox Live marketplace is for aspiring game developers and students to get their games out. I think it's perfect at doing that. If you're a developer and plan to generate large sums of cash, sadly you are deluded and are not seeing the point of the Indie marketplace.
Why? Well there are 2 parts to the picture. 1 is you get your talents known and have proof you can ship a game. 2 there is the Xbox Live Arcade. The XBLA is where you generate profits. Only developers who have proved themselves or already existing developers can create games and sell them. Their goal should be to create XBLA games not XBLIG.
I'd guess I would profit more on ~$10 a download, over $1.
The whole purpose of the Indie game scene on the Xbox Live marketplace is for aspiring game developers and students to get their games out.
Then why not do so on the PC? The only downside I can see about making PC games is, as Miguel Sternberg said in the article, "One bonus for going with a console is that we can count on everyone playing with a gamepad, something you can't count on when developing for the PC." A typical PC game needs a separate PC for each player because most people aren't willing to hook a TV and gamepads up to a PC, as I've gathered from previous discussions on Slashdot.
I'm not infallible. The market results described in this article demonstrate that my previous advice of using Mono was ill founded.
You don't worry about hardware requirements on a console. If it runs for one dude, it runs for everyone.
I had previously considering the rule of thumb that if it runs on this year's netbook, it runs for more or less everyone. An Atom CPU is more or less equivalent to a P4, and the Intel GMA (nicknamed "Graphics My [behind]") in a netbook is comparable to a decade-old GeForce 3 or Radeon 9000 video card according to Tom's chart.
Just because they are indi doesn't mean they don't have to do the same stuff as the big guys do to get their stuff noticed, namely, advertise.
Yup it costs money but XBLM is NOT "The Field of Dreams" There is no "if you make it they will come"
You want people to buy your stuff, let them know it's out there TO buy.
that's sometimes a good way to make your games profitable
i know the success of Modern Warfare 2 may make that hard to believe but trust me on this
Here in EU I can't see Indie games section on my new Xbox when logged with my new Live profile, is this a trend?
Well the closed system does not help I liked the old shareware systems. The high costs of DEV kits holds down the small guys. Also Xbox Live Indie Games has limits that are in place to make it hard to make a game on the level of the big guys.
The binary distribution package must be no larger than 150 MB (dumb and makes you cut down on stuff like art, sounds and levels.
The games are priced at 80, 240, or 400 Microsoft Points (approximately $1, 3, and 5, respectively). Games larger than 50 MB must be priced at least 240 Microsoft Points.[12] Prior to the August 2009 update, the pricing structure was set at 200, 400, or 800 Microsoft Points.[11] (limited price points sucks apple's app store lets have a lot more choice here) And games over 50 meg must cost $3 or more?
XBLIG games do not have achievements or leaderboards, nor are they listed on a player's "Gamer Card (why does this need to locked out?) at least have leaderboards.
No, I think it was the pit stains, Steve.
How about The Impossible Game?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
If you use the 'everywhere' tools like OpenGL.
I wouldn't think of using anything else for a PC-centric project.
I'll still admit - Visual Studio is the best IDE on the market. [...] Don't even get me started about XCode.. Bleh.
Then use Visual Studio to make an OpenGL+SDL game for Windows, and use XCode only to finish up the Mac version. Or what am I missing?
Sony's Linux+voodoo based SDK
Sure, NVIDIA acquired 3dfx and later made the PS3's RSX GPU, but how much Voodoo tech is in the RSX?
The singularity of 'it'll run anywhere' will hit us when javascript is good enough to support the next Id game.
Not the next Id game, mind you, but Id Tech 2 has been ported to the Java platform under the name Jake2.
The only 'indie' game I acquired from XBL was Braid and it was a steaming pile of pretentious crap
This is not true of all indie games. Its a bit of hit and miss affair, and this is also true of titles from big publishers.
The binary distribution package must be no larger than 150 MB
This is much bigger than WiiWare's 40 MB limit and comparable to the biggest of big-guy games for Nintendo DS. All but 18 DS games released in the United States are 128 MB (1024 Mbit) or smaller according to Pocket Heaven's release list.
makes you cut down on stuff like art, sounds and levels
When .kkrieger fits in 0.1 MB, 128 MB looks positively spacious, especially for a game without AAA production values.
... suck. It must be said that developing games is exceedingly time consuming and cost prohibitive exercise. There's too much work that has to go into a game before you'll even get noticed. Not to mention all the great free games on sites like kongregate.
Can your indie game compare to a free game like villainous?
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Rete/villainous
You'd have to be out of your mind or very skilled to develop games, and all of your team members have to be firing on all cylinders over the long haul of the games development. There's just too many people in game development with too few high quality skills.
Because it's not the norm on that platform for the developer to be necessarily profit oriented. Sure there are many who seek to make a profit, but a lot of them just like making games for the console, and selling them is merely a bonus.
Braid is an Xbox Live Arcade game, not an Xbox Live Indie game. There's a difference.
I'm a lifelong gamer, professional developer (business software), and amateur game developer. I've started dozens of little game projects over the years, but they almost always end the same way, which is by my saying "Why am I spending all my time doing this? Who's going to play this game?" Maybe my friends might humor me a bit, but really, I had no way to reach a larger audience.
Enter XBLIG. With a $99 entrance fee and free tools, and a lot of quality libraries out there (physics, particles, etc), it was a amateur's dream come true. I've released two games, sold thousands of copies, and had a really thrilling time doing it.
Maybe I'm part of the problem, selling "junk" out there, who knows. But I'm having a ball. Contrast that with the whiners who cry because they can't make a living from XBLIG alone.
Hardware consistency, everyone is using the same system and that system runs the latest games for that platform perfectly, you can code to the limit, not the bare minimum.
I'm under the impression that a game engine designed for the asset budget of an indie game might not even fully stress the capability of the bare minimum. A couple of the screenshots in the article were of 2D games.
also the ability to use Kinect.
Windows 7 officially supports the Kinect sensor, and a subset of functionality (depth field, not automatic skeleton recognition) is available with third-party user-mode Kinect sensor drivers.
compared to having to set up your own distribution and paywall system
Would something like osCommerce + Super Download Shop + PayPal/Google/Amazon payment work? Or perhaps your point is that the annual price of HTTPS hosting approaches the App Hub + Xbox Live Gold membership fee.
Moreover, the fact that the XNA framework uses a programming language not common on non-Microsoft platforms (C#) limits portability of a game designed for XBLIG to other platforms. I've been told that other .NET languages (e.g. IronPython) can't run in the XNA environment for various reasons, such as the lack of System.Reflection.Emit. Or should one just plan on making entirely separate products for XBLIG vs. other platforms?
I can say the situation isn't too good. Promotion for most of these games is non-existent on Microsoft's part. Too few games make enough in revenue to cover the money spent (usually on art/music) to produce the game, even less cover the programmer's time.
Those that have made the highest-quality games are almost all leaving or considering leaving the platform. The biggest problem is quality: maybe 50% of games are no better than your average free Flash game; most of the rest are ok quality but highly derivative. High-quality games get no special promotion and are thrown in the New Releases list next to Breakout clones and gimmick app/games. The Indie Games area would ideally be reserved for games that are nearly Xbox Live Arcade quality but are too niche or can't fit in the extremely crowded XBLA release schedule.
Advertising these small $1 indie games isn't tenable, as the cost for ad impressions/clickthroughs is higher than the return on one extra sale of a $1 game. Getting someone browsing the Internet on their PC to download a demo on their Xbox is difficult as well, in psychology and process.
Of course Nintendo and Sony don't offer anything comparable (peer-reviewed indie games with no dev-kit cost or possibility of game concept rejection) so the most similar platform one can threaten to leave to is the mobile phone market, whose pitfalls have been repeated ad nauseum since the first few stories of iPhone-coder millionaires.
The best solution to fix XBLIG is some way to promote certain games to a special 'not-crap' section that gets dashboard promotion and is more easily accessed than the rest of the stuff. Some actual competition from Sony would go a long way.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
That's because Australia requires classification of all video games for socially objectionable elements, and the XBLIG business model cannot afford to pay the Australian Classification Board $2,040 per title. If you want to play unrated games, you could try becoming a skilled worker.
The European Union is not yet a sovereign state. Which EU member state is associated with your profile?
Braid is an Xbox Live Arcade game, not an Xbox Live Indie game. There's a difference.
Yes, the OP got mixed up with "Indy game on the Xbox in the arcade section" and "Indy game on the Xbox in the Indy section".
You know where else there is a difference? Being a pretentious jerkoff and being a pretentious but articulate jerkoff.
I'm a lifelong gamer, professional developer (business software), and amateur game developer.
Read: I never got a real job interacting with real people, so I sit behind a computer. A lot. And I do alright.
I thought the indie program was to act as an incubator and teach people XBox development. Any profit was to be icing.
Yes the Indie games on Xbox Live is designed for learning, but for all intents, it's the only "App Store" for the Xbox, and Microsoft has been sorely dropping the ball here.
Two things the Xbox is doing poorly:
a. Not being a General Purpose system, it's so far been relegated to "Toy that also plays movies", despite it having other potential applications if given the right accessories. Kinect has some very good potential for Avatar-based/Machima type movies. You can connect a regular mouse and keyboard because of the standard USB connectors. But good luck finding anything that supports anything but the gamepad. The Gamepad is TERRIBLE for text entry, you need the add-on for it.
b. No intuitive search system of any kind (This problem extends to Zune and Netflix as well.) It's a pain in the ass, there is no way to simply browse anything. If you don't know what you're looking for, you won't find it. There's some interesting Japanese things in the independent games, but you won't find them unless you were looking on the website on your PC.
It's only ahead of the PS3 because of Xbox Live, because non-tampered machines can't cheat, and can't pirate software as easily as the PS3 can. Nobody wants to play with cheating pirates.
The Delta patching system on the Xbox, and the Wii's limited memory are major issues, and Microsoft and Nintendo slipped up pretty bad in the storage department. On the next version of the consoles they should let any USB storage device to be used, and/or SD cards, but use an encrypted file system that is "hidden" from other OS's. This is done easily enough, the XBOX 360 partially does this already, but needs to be actually taken one further step by making the file system locked to the console, and store the decryption keys on the system internal flash storage. If the drive is then put into another Xbox 360, the Xbox Live re-verifies all the software was legally purchased and then authorizes the new XBOX 360. If you put this drive into an Windows PC, it would then only see "drive images" in the file system, but since windows doesn't have keys for it, it can't read it. If by chance Microsoft becomes smart, they could let the games be played on Windows with Live authorization, but denote separate achievements/scores from playing on Windows since the environment is different and much easier to crack.
Did anyone else get the feeling that the developers thought Microsoft should do something to promote their games. If your game isn't known, then you need to get the word out. No one is going to do it for you. Promote it. Buy an ad. I'm sorry it costs money but that's how it is for everyone.
Stick with html 5 and ajax is your best bet for cross platform and Windows 8 tile compatibility.
Microsoft declared a couple weeks ago that it refuses to make WebGL work in IE, citing what it believes to be insurmountable GLSL security problems.
Wow, I've been waiting for a Minecraft console port. Knockoff or not, that looks seriously awesome.
On a related note, does anyone know if there is a website that specifically reviews Xbox Live indie games? I would love to keep track of the best of these, but usually the only way I hear about games like this is haphazardly (like I just did with FortressCraft in this summary). There is so much unoriginal crap on Xbox Live, I really would like a way to separate the wheat from the latest Bejeweled clone.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
While Xbox Live itself doesn't advertise good games, becoming a Kotaku pick, which is listed in the XBLIG interface, should greatly increase visibility and likely profitability too.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
98% of them utterly suck. I download the "xbox indie" demos on a regular basis and 9 times out of 10 I delete the thing within 30 seconds of trying it because it is complete and utter crap.
In fact I have bought only ONE of them, and honestly it did not have enough re playability or memorability because I cant remember what it's name is.
The good ones are impossible to find because Microsoft does not want to put in a working rating system nor any decent showcase system.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes, natural talent is important. Some people might just not be meant to get into game development.
But just like most other things in life, very few people get by talent alone. Most people got to where they are through a combination of talent, hard work, networking, and maybe just sheer dumb luck (luck could include just being lucky to be born by the right people at the right time...)
If the people have the passion for making games, go for it I say. Even if you lack the talent, you can improve in the other areas . Just don't expect to be the next "gaming god" any time soon, of course.
News at 11!
Every complaint the article mentions applies equally well to indie games in other markets as well. Guess what, making a good game is hard, and it's even harder to make a good game stand out. Everyone loves to talk about Minecraft, but it's so far past the indie game curve that it might as well not be on it anymore.
Advertising is hard--that's why people can make money doing it for you. Making a good game is hard--same principle. Having both happen for some dude coding out of his parents basement is rare, which is why it's newsworthy. People starting businesses based mainly on hope which subsequently fail, however, is not.
In particular services like Impulse and Steam. I don't know how they select games for promotion. However they do, I've seen little indy games promoted on their front pages. If the game is good, and it is what gamers are after at a given time, it can sell really well.
A recent example I can think of would be Terraria. Indy game in the same vein as minecraft, but old school 2D side scroller, and with more objectives to achieve. It is a Steamworks protected game so Steam only, and it has done really well. RPS found that during the final week of June it was the #2 seller on Steam, second only to F3AR, which is of course a AAA title and a sequel.
So, those would be the places I would go were I trying to develop indy games. You can also just sell them on your website, of course, but digital services like that offer people a place to browse, and they will promote your game if the circumstances are right. What those circumstances are, I can't tell you as I haven't looked in to it but it is there.
I bought some, and my daughter (who isn't old enough to have an X-Box Live Account) couldn't play them. The problem is that despite their stated policies when you buy the game, they don't let people without X-Box Live accounts play them and you can't play them if your network connection is down. This is because Microsoft wants to make sure that Indie Games don't do anything naughty, so they require that you check their servers to make sure that the game hasn't been revoked before you play it. When I buy X-Box or X-Box Live Arcade games everyone in my household can play them. When I buy Indie Games, it's just me because I'm the only one with an X-Box Live account (although my wife could certainly sign-up for a free Silver one if she wanted). I bought SuperCow so that my daughter could play it, but Microsoft won't let her. So it's not that I'd never, ever buy an Indie game, but it would have to be really good to overcome that handicap.
Seriously, when people point to any of Farb-rausch's 64k demos as examples of how bloated software is, all it shows is ignorance. Don't get me wrong I -love- what they do, it is really cool "optimize for one thing" kinds of development, not to mention that many of their demos have really good music/art direction. However it is not at all feasible for general use. Never mind all the rather sever limitation on what you can do in terms of assets, have you ever looked at one of those demos when they are running? Kkrieger uses 300MB of RAM when running. The reason is that they have to procedurally generate a bunch of crap in to RAM, since none of the assets can be stored on disk to keep the size down. It is extremely neat as a demo, not useful as an actual method for developing software.
So people people stop with the "OMG Farb-rausch can make tiny apps everyone should!" Learn about what they do, maybe download their tools and play with them. It is amazingly fucking cool but nobody, not even them, suggests all apps should be done like that.
Seriously, when people point to any of Farb-rausch's 64k demos as examples of how bloated software is, all it shows is ignorance.
I wasn't trying to imply that all software should adopt Farbrausch's methods straight up, only that developers crunched for space can learn a lot from those methods. If FR demos can compress things severely by procedurally making everything from scratch, others can probably compress them less severely by storing assets in low detail and enhancing them at runtime with procedural synthesis of the fine details. Think of it as being like the difference between PNG and SVG.
none of the assets can be stored on disk to keep the size down.
How big can saved games be on an Xbox 360?
Kkrieger uses 300MB of RAM when running.
And a 360 has more than that. Besides, I thought we were discussing distribution package size.
Does /. really not remember this?
It was a time when consoles were increasingly getting the attention of developers.
Consoles that were not based on Microsoft Windows and its APIs.
Developer mindshare is one of Microsoft's greatest assets.
Hell, they might even have their CEO to jump around and scream on a stage like an idiot if they think it'd get any developer's attention.
I'm serious, I wouldn't put it past them.
Well the Xbox Live Indie Games section isn't available in most countries. Obviously they are going to be limited.
Are you incapable of explaining the reason to your family or are they unable to comprehend it?
They value future consumption (food and shelter during retirement) over present consumption (toys), and they sometimes have trouble understanding the difference between tools used for one's career and toys used for personal entertainment, especially when the tools (e.g. Xbox 360 console) are prominently sold to the public as toys. And they appear to view any scheme where one must pay to join a club before being able to sell products as a pyramid scam, not unlike Vector Marketing where one must first buy a set of Cutco knives before selling them.
No, you stated you need 5 years of XBL Gold, you then stated the reason why you need it is to peer review titles.
I mentioned peer review in the context of "and you don't even need app hub until you get to platform testing." XBL Gold would be used for testing online multiplayer features of my own games and peer-reviewing games that include online multiplayer features. And if I don't buy enough years of membership to cover the expected remaining lifetime of the platform, am I supposed to give up, withdraw my games from the XBLIG market, and go back to PC exclusivity after the 365th day of membership?