Ping Time

Apparently this is the first time I've actually written a blog here, despite having been active for something like 7 years now. If you come on irc (irc.maxgaming.net #garagegames) there’s a good chance you know me, but for those that don’t, I suppose I should introduce myself first...

These days I work remotely as the second of Max Gaming's two fulltime artists, our most recent release being Lore Aftermath on InstantAction. I graduated from college with a Computer Engineering degree last December; yes, I am in fact an artist who can program. Which brings me to the main point of this blog.

I've been working with XNA a fair bit for the past year, and last weekend I threw up a very small (in fact, the smallest one released yet), simple little app on Xbox Live Community Games, in large part as something of a joke. To my very pleasant surprise, particularly given the low sales figures many have posted about their games, it’s not only selling, but selling far better than I had hoped.

Ping Time is a clock. A funny retro styled clock, but still just a clock. I'd written a similar app a few years back to use as a screensaver for my laptop, and remembering that people had seemed to like it in college, I figured what the heck, and spent an hour porting it to XNA. I only have 4 days worth of sales figures, but I like seeing the numbers others have posted, so I'll return the favor.


From last Saturday through Tuesday Ping Time has had 3946 trial downloads, with a conversion rate of 5.2%, resulting in 208 copies sold at 200 MS points each. The more detailed breakdown is to the right. Microsoft converts points to dollars at $0.0121 per point, and keeps 30%, resulting in approximately $1.65 per sale. So, so far, this little app has made me about $350, averaging around $85-90 per day. Not bad for something I was hoping to make maybe $100 over a few weeks.

I know everyone likes charts and whatnot, so even though there’s too little data to really estimate anything yet, I went ahead and made up a few others. The pie chart shows total sales and trials per country. And the very limited line chart is plotting sales and trial across all countries per day. As was expected, Saturday pulled in the most, but sales are remaining about the same each day so far.

















I'll try to remember to make another post in a couple weeks once I have a better range of data from sales for this thing; feel free to hop on IRC and ask me if I seem to have forgotten. If you want to read the press release I wrote for it (Still seems a bit ridiculous to me, writing a press release for something I made in an hour :) ) you can read it at www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ping-time-xbox-360-based-novelty-clock and hopefully more places as time goes on ;).

If you want a bit of a preview of one of the more serious projects I'm trying to finish up for release on Community games Click Here.