Xbox Live Community Games sales stats for Dr. Popper
There has been a lot of talk over the past few days about the statistics that have become available on the first wave of Xbox Live Community Games created in XNA and sold through the Community Marketplace on the Xbox 360. Overall, game developers and others in the industry have been pretty bleak about their numbers. I'll admit that I was a bit disappointed, but it wasn't because of the sales themselves, it was because I had guessed that the numbers were higher based on what some others who have ways of tracking users had reported. If I didn't have access to those numbers, I probably would have been very happy with my numbers, and after my initial reaction I am happy with how Dr. Popper has done.
So to the numbers...
Dr. Popper sold about 2200 copies at 200 points each for approximately $3600 after Microsoft takes their share. It had a 12% conversion rate, 12% of the people who downloaded it actually bought it. I thought this was pretty good. So if anything, I needed to do a better job of getting the word out about the game. Only 18,000 downloads out of more than 28 million Xbox users shows room for improvement.
So as a bit of a thank you to the Xbox community, I have started a little contest where you can win a year of Xbox Live Gold or 4000 points. It's free and easy to enter, you can learn about here:
http://www.bluerosegames.com/xna101/post/Contest-to-thank-all-who-have-played-and-purchased-Dr-Popper-on-Xbox-Live-Community-Games.aspx
Contest to thank all who have played and purchased Dr. Popper on Xbox Live Community Games
We've finally received some sales estimates on Xbox Live Community Games, and as a thank you to all who have tried Dr. Popper, I wanted to have a bit of fun with a contest. Over the next couple of days, download and play Dr. Popper MegaShifter mode, and twitter your high score. More details here:
http://www.drpopper.com
Compile your XNA 2D games to run in Silverlight with SilverSprite
In December, I released my Dr. Popper game on Xbox Live Community Games (XLCG) which allows you to sell your XNA based games on the Xbox 360. We also started work on Silver Arcade, a hosted game platform for Silverlight games.
So I started thinking more about how to make a game for both XNA and Silverlight. At first I thought about creating an abstraction layer on top of the two to provide a consistent way of writing games for both. The problem with this is that anyone else who wanted to use this framework would have to learn something new.
So instead I started to work on something ambitious, and really had no expectations up front that it would actually work. The idea was to create a way to compile your XNA 2D code and content into a Silverlight application. Even better would be if you didn't really have to change much or any code. This actually worked out better than I thought and gave rise to SilverSprite. SilverSprite is available as an open source project on CodePlex and the licensing should allow you to use it in any way you wish.
I released a new version this weekend that adds some new features. Here is a partial current list:
- Implements much of SpriteBatch, so many SpriteBatch games should be easy to get working
- Bitmap fonts are supported
- Compressed DXT textures are supported to reduce XAP size.
- Gamepad controls are mapped to keyboard
- Keyboard and mouse are supported
One thing I do ask is that if you port your XNA game to Silverlight, that you consider hosting it on Silver Arcade.