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Having been through the idea > dev > release cycle two and two thirds times now, and in combination with having learned a lot from my last game and trying to work out what last year's sales figures tell us, I have a few observations I'd like to share about where I think the channel is going in terms of image, quality, quantity and pricing. Some of you I know disagree with my thoughts on this, and I'd welcome an informed debate. But "informed" is the operative word ;0)
It seems pretty obvious to me now that I made an awful mistake in choosing Space Pirates for my last release. Let's for a moment disregard the events immediately after release when I had to pull the game and focus instead on what games are doing well and what that tells us about the kinds of games people are buying from the service. Last year's sales figures, copied from this thread, make interesting reading:
sales/dls = sell% rating/#ratings (US)
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1 I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 160k 4.75*/30172
2 Avatar Drop 117k/433k=27.1% 4* /10181
3 RC-AirSim 74k/450k=16.4% 3.25*/ 2762
4 Headshot 2.75*/ 7781
5 Miner Dig Deep 4.5* / 5454
6 Rumble Massage 3.5* / 804
7 Who Did I Date Last Night 2* / 6225
8 Kodu Game Lab 4.25*/ 3303
9 Avatar Golf ?/259k=? 3.75*/ 5130 * Developer shared download numbers only
10 Aquarium HD 24k/172k=14% 2.75*/ 679
11 myFishtank 22k/138k=16% 3.25*/ 1631
12 Head Shot 2 3.75*/ 2446
13 DrumKit 22k/200k=11% 3.25*/ 673
14 A Perfect Massage 3.25*/ 1193
15 The Impossible Game 31k/115k=29.6% 4.25*/ 2770 *Yes its correct I checked. Not sure why it seems wrong.
16 Inside Lacrosse's CL2010 17k/ 51k=33.8% 4.5* / 4031
17 ZP2K9 16k 4.25*/ 2080
18 ezmuze+ Hamst3r edition 14k/ 93k=15.11% 4.5* / 3713
19 The Drinking Game 2* / 2432
20 Physics Sandbox 3.25*/ 2398
With the exceptions of Kodu, ezmuze+ and Inside Lacrosse's CL2010 I think they're all nice, tidy, well formed little games. Not nessecarily small in terms of level design, or gameplay hours, but in terms of what you actually do in the game and how you do it, they're real easy to pick up and play. Kodu as we all know is a more involved product, demanding a fair level of involvement to get results and I'm not looking to examine the "app vs game" debate. ezmuse+ stands out as (possibly) the best app on the service but again, that's not what I'm interested in just now. CL2010 is a great sports sim, and had a specific target audience. It's well-written, playable, and fun but it's such a specific sport it's testament to the devs for getting as many sales as they did. We'll also ignore the massage apps because really, no-one should be making those still and most of us won't review any that are submitted. +1 rep to the community for that.
The remaining games are a motley bunch of good games. Highly-rated with good reviews, long-standing exposure on the top downloads list, and of all the games released on the service it's those in the top 20 which people who know the channel and it's output would recognise. Zombies, Miner Dig Deep, RC Airsim, the two Headshot games and The Impossible Game all leap out at me because they all do one thing and do it very, very well: They fulfill the desire of gamers for something which they can't get on XBLA and would never see on a disc-based game. They're like a sugary snack and a can of pop - an instant hit of fun and refreshment.
Would you see any of these games translate in to XBLA hits, which would be in a similar sales position relative to the other titles on that service? Can we compare (say) RC Airsim to Trials HD? In some ways we can. Both games are idealised simulations - Trials giving a 3D perspective on a 2D game model, and RC giving a simple but accurate simulation of flying a model aircraft. How about production values, in terms of graphical and audio assets, menu polish, features, scoring and integration to the general Xbox "experience"?
Of course there's a stark difference there. I have no idea what the budgets for either Trials or RC were, but I will wager they were poles appart! This then, in my opinion, is the biggest difference between what gamers expect from Indie Games and what they expect from XBLA titles - production quality. We simply can not compete with studios who can invest thousands of man hours and tens of thousands of dollars at creative assets. Indies in other areas of development (be that PC, iPhone, or whatever) who have tasted success have recognised and embraced that position. If you can not compete in terms of production bedget you have to play smart and do things which the larger studios can't. They can't produce games like Impossible, or RC Airsim, The Drinking Game or Headshot and if they did they would be entirely different games. When a pro studio thinks "platformer", they think Winterbottom rather than Johnny Platform. When they think "flight sim" they think ACE Combat and not RC Airsim. THIS is where we have the advantage. We have access to a corner of the gamer market which game studios can't or won't cater for, and 160,000 sales in less than a year is a pretty chunky corner when you think about how things were a year ago!
My last game, Space Pirates, was a great example of the wrong game poorly designed and poorly tested. I've taken responsibility for that, and I'm trying to learn what lessons I can while still keeping those lessons in perspective. Combining that experience with the sales figures above, and with the posts made in the sales numbers thread, I think it can be established that large games which want to be AAA titles are doomed to failure on the Indie Games channel. If gamers want large games they know where to go and (once again) we simply can not compete with the pro studios in terms to research, production, manhours, testing and marketing. That's not to say you can't have a critical success with a more complex game, but I firmly believe that if you're developing anything other than (what we now call) casual games, you are on a hiding to nothing in commercial terms.
The Dual Stick shooter glut meant that no single one of their number reached the top 20 except James' title (which had a significant headstart an any other game because of James' reputation and marketing), even though there were some belters in there. If there had been fewer of them then the story might have been different. But look at the distribution of genres through that top 20 list - a veritable spectrum of different types of game. I think that RPGs are the new Dual-Stick shooters on the service, and again I think that they will be blocking eachother for market position. They are such a specific type of game that really, it's pretty tough to differentiate your game from everyone else's, especially in a situation where our production budgets are in tens of dollars rather than tens of thousands. RPGs are up against the big boys in no uncertain terms, and without some breakthrough gameplay variations it is a competition that indies will largely loose. That's not to berate those working on RPGs - you pays your memberships you chooses your own project - but when combined with the next thing I'd like to discuss it can begin to cause problems. The next thing I want to talk about is pricing.
In the "real world", you charge whatever the market will pay. You don't automatically dive to the lowest price because a) the public perception is that a low price says things about the quality of your product and b) it puts more pressure on your sales targets. Let's say that both the sales chart position and gameplay of Zombies justifies it's price point - I think that's a fair thing to say. That's pretty good, because the "lightest" games on the service should really be comparable to Zombies in terms of how long people play it and the general feel and quality of the game. Basically it's a great Indie game (in the broadest sense). 80 points represents a fair price for both the customer and the producer. Ezmuze costs 800 points and still made it to the top 20. It's STILL priced at 800 points and I bet it's still selling pretty well. This title too does something that no XBLA titles do, it has real class to it in terms of production values. It justifies it's price point with it's unique purpose, content and it's quality. 800 must be a fair price because so many people paid it. My conclusion is this: If you feel your only chance to do well is to price at the lowest point available (and, as in some cases, you sacrifice content in order to be eligable for the 80-point pricetag) then I honestly think you're doing it wrong. Worse - you're not just selling yourself short but you're putting other developers in a position where they HAVE to price at 80 just to compete. Effectively, you've devalued developer time to the extent that games which have taken months and months to develop and polish are being priced at 80 points when that is a gross misrepresentation of the quality of the product. Basically, price should be commensurate with the quality of the product AND the effort put in to creating it. The idea of the "value" of a game is becoming skewed and distorted. This is bad for us, bad for gamers and bad for the service.
Producing something for which gamers already have lots of "trusted sources" and then pricing it at 80 points is absolute commercial suicide. Now many of you will be saying "I'm not writing just for sales numbers" and that may be true, but when you see your first set of sales data and you managed to shift 35 sales and 150 trials in your first weekend, you will be hurt and confused and upset and for a good few days you won't even want to talk about the game. Trust me, I've been there. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be commercially successful - in fact that's pretty much the best way to judge how good your game is provided you're making the right kinds of games.
We're in a position now where, with the help of increaing dash exposure and the various DBP compos, we're starting to get a better reputation. But that reputation is based on those games which stand out on the channel because there's nothing quite like them available anywhere else on the platform. Please God we all recognise that, write to the strengths of the channel, and price sensibly. I've said a few times that I think we'll see our first XBLIG millionaire this year, and I am betting it'll either be James with a combination of Zombies and his upcoming title, or something so entirely out of left field that people will be asking where the hell the idea came from and why they couldn't think of it. Question is, will you as a developer be trying to find that idea or will you be slogging away for months on a game which is doomed from the start?
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