My Xbox Live Community Game Sales Data

Microsoft is now releasing sales data to creators of Xbox Live Community Games. For those completely new to this concept, you can freely download XNA and Visual C# Express and the get the Torque X Game Engine to create a game for the Xbox 360. With a XNA Creator's Club membership, you deploy your game to your Xbox 360. Then, after some play testing and peer review, you can publish your game to the Xbox Community Games Marketplace, with exposure to the millions of Xbox Live Gold Subscribers.

I wrote about my little puzzle game, Solicheck, a while ago. As I last mentioned, it took about a month to create using TGB and then about a weekend to migrate the code to Torque X/XNA. It took another 2 weeks to fix minor bugs, mostly relating to Xbox 360 deployment. My best advice is to buy an Xbox 360 Memory module and test for compatibility.

When the game was looking good enough to release, I posted it on the Creator's Club for play testing. From here, anyone with a Creator's Club membership can download the game and try it out. Feedback and suggestions roll-in (sometimes helpful, sometimes not). After final edits are made, the game is submitted into formal Peer Review. This is where the game is rated for accuracy. This is not a review of whether or not people like your game, just that it meets the violence/maturity ratings you have specified. After some unclear number of positive reviews (I'm estimating 10), the game will pass into the marketplace. Now, anyone with an Xbox Live Gold Subscription can find your game in the Community Games folder from the Xbox Dashboard.

I launched Solicheck just before Christmas 2008. I didn't make any effort to promote the game, other than mention it on my website and post a YouTube video - mostly so I could show the gameplay to friends. For those of you who know me, I always have about a thousand things to do at any given time, so spending time on promotions wasn't in the time budget. For the longest time, I had wondered how the game would do. And now, Microsoft has just released the vital data to creators.

The sales data comes in as a grid of numbers (by month) as shown in the first image above. You can download each month's data as a .csv file for easy manipulation in Microsoft Excel. The data includes Date, Country, Price, and Units Sold. Not much on the surface, but with Excel, these numbers can be summed-up, sorted, grouped, and so on. So, here's the breakdown:

Total Downloads = 1756
Total Purchases = 59
Conversion Percentage = 3.36%
Regions = USA 63%, UK 20%, France 8%, Canada/Italy 3%

The game sells for 200pts (about $2.50 USD/2.30 EU). At 59 sales, that comes to a generated revenue of $147. Microsoft gets to keep 30% of that for distribution, so my final take should be about $103. Not quite retirement time. But, it's only been 3 months with no promotion at all. I was also not expecting much from a single-player checkers game. This was more about the experience. Afterall, I can't really promote Torque X/XNA and Community Games without first going through the process myself.

Another point that comes to mind is that these sales spread across a global market. Being a lazy American, I have not done enough to really embrace the worldwide market that Community Games are offering. For example (the chart at the bottom quantifies downloads). In this case, the numbers look like this:

Regions = USA 66%, UK 14%, Canada 8%, France 6%


This means that the regional conversion numbers look like this:

Canada = 1.46%
France = 4.76%
Italy = 3.92%
Spain = 2.04%
UK = 4.72%
USA = 3.19%

The highest conversion rate comes from France. Perhaps puzzle games are more popular in France than in the USA, which had higher sales, but a lower conversion rate. My only point is that you should not underestimate the worldwide market. At the very least, your games should not be offensive to a specific region. At the very best, your games should embrace worldwide cultures. I'm playing with the idea of translating the Solicheck2 GUI into French - anyone in France interested?

As for next steps... I have a ton of work on my plate. There's a lot of Torque X engine activity going on, other game projects, consulting, and new product development at EnvyGames. But, I'll still find a few hours on the weekend to update Solicheck with new artwork, new levels, and improved gameplay. So, lookout for Solicheck2 - and that's the end of my game promoting ;)

John K.
www.envygames.com