Naturally when engaging in a business venture, it's prudent to do a bit of research.
Estimating sales figures for Xbox Live Community Games has proven to be a pretty tricky task. The closest similar market is naturally Xbox Live Arcade, and even here sales figures are seldom publicly announced. VGChartz.com does a good job of estimating sales based on a clever web-crawling methodology, but it's still not accurate.
An enterprising chap on the XNA Creators Club forums has come up with another polling tool that checks the Xbox Live Most Popular list on a regular basis. Based on this we can work out approximately what sales volume Community Games are achieving, by comparison to estimated figures for XBLA titles adjacent in the rankings. Current data suggest that Community titles may be selling at levels equal to 20th best-selling Arcade title, which is no mean feat at around 2,000 copies in an average week.
There's a caveat to that, however. There's speculation that these popularity lists aren't entirely accurate in the first place, and that it's counting trial downloads as full game downloads.
Our research has shown so far, on admittedly small samples, that we can expect Community games as a whole to achieve around 15% of Arcade sales. The market shows clear sign for expansion as a significant proportion of respondents had not even checked out the Community Games Marketplace, and others still said that they'd be more inclined to spend points on a larger number of cheap titles.
In conclusion? I'm concerned for the developers basing business decisions on the optimistically-high popularity-based figures, and all developers would do well to market not only their wares, but also CG initiative as a whole in order to reach 'unconverted' market potential.
4 comments:
here are my answers to your poll on neogaf about xna community games.
1> Have you explored the Xbox Live Community Games Marketplace?
yes, i look out for new stuff quite often.
2> How many (if any) Community Game Trials have you downloaded?
about 20.
3> How many (if any) Gommunity Games have you purchased?
4.
4> How many (if any) XBLA titles have you purchased in the last twelve months?
9.
5> What is your impression of Community Games thus far?
love it, best thing to happen to video gaming in 2008 if you ask me.
the reason i post this on your blog is that i have been forced to lurk on neogaf for over a year now because they for whatever reason will not confirm my membership. i have a favor to ask, would you mind mailing a mod and asking what the status of "mujun" is?
Done, my good sir, but it appears their support email address has a problem. Will try PMing someone!
Thanks for your feedback, it's all very useful.
thanks a lot! yeah i tried mailing the support address a few times and had the same problem. i appreciate your help!
hey deejay, any love from the gaf mods?
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