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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.
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.
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.
You make good points. However:
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.
Assets are not the only things that are computationally expensive, there are plenty of AI, physics, shader effects, etc... that are beyond the scope of the bare minimum. And the obvious way to get around a distribution limit is to use the computational power to generate as many procedural assets as you can.
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.
Yes i have seen there is a BETA version of the SDK recently made available. You can do it, but it's still sold as an XBox accessory, most consumers are using kinect with an XBox anyway.
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.
Yes obviously you can do it with a combination of other services, the point is you don't have to, it's all included.
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.
You are suggesting targeting the PC but if multiple platforms is your goal then you know that by targeting XBLIG you get 90% of the PC gaming market that you are suggesting as the alternative anyway.
Or should one just plan on making entirely separate products for XBLIG vs. other platforms?
XBLIG + Windows7 vs other platforms, yes. Given that XBLIG + Windows 7 is the vast majority of the gaming market anyway, as hobbyist if you've targeted that then you're doing well.
I thought the indie program was to act as an incubator and teach people XBox development. Any profit was to be icing.