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
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
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.
I'm currently working on an exciting pet project. The idea is to allow you to compile an XNA 2D game as a Silverlight application with no code changes. I currently have my Dr. Popper game for Xbox Live Community Games running successfully in Silverlight with no code changes, so it is possible. There are some limitations right now, like no render targets or pixel shader support, no direct manipulation of Texture2D data, and no sprite fonts that load from a bitmap. Some of these features will be available eventually, some with the help of new features coming in Silverlight 3.
I'm looking for more games that I can try to get running to work out some of the kinks in the library, so if you're interested please let me know. It also may turn into a new revenue stream for your game:
http://www.bluerosegames.com/silverlight-games-101/post/Got-a-Silverlight-Game-Want-to-make-some-money.aspx
or you could put an online version out to promote your Xbox Live Community Game.
I'm pleased to announce that a new version of Dr. Popper has passed peer review.
There was an intermittent crashing bug on startup with Dr. Popper, basically if you pressed A repeatedly on startup it could crash. I also enabled high scores in trial mode so that trial users could get a better idea about how that works.
Note that it seems that there's not currently an auto-update for community games so if you want this new version you'll have to download again.
One comment on the peer review process. When you submit a game for peer review, a new post gets added to the forum thread to discuss it, but email notifications don't go out to the people that have previously peer reviewed your game and commented on it. So when resubmitting for peer review, you should probably post to your peer review forum and specifically talk about what has changed.
Remember that peer review is for completed games and abusing the peer review process doesn't benefit anyone. Blatant abuse of the peer review process can cause a ban of the developer.
So it's been a couple of weeks now since Dr. Popper was approved for Xbox Live Community games. I?m pleased to announce that it made the top 10 for sales last week (ok barely, it was number 10). Before you ask, I don?t know what that means yet, I don't think that actual sales numbers are being shared yet, so it might be less than 10 sales, or a thousand, no idea yet.
When bringing Dr. Popper to Xbox, there were two major efforts. One was since it was a mouse-based windows game, I had to implement a gamepad based interface. This also included having to create a menu system. I plan on releasing my gamepad classes soon which I found very helpful to give the gamepad an easier interface. I also created a keyboard version of these so that you can test on Windows without a gamepad. If you're interested drop me a note and I can get these to you sooner.
It's critical that you're able to test your Xbox game on Windows since you won't want to have to deploy your game each time you want to test. This means you need an Xbox Gamepad to use on your PC. You have two options, my preferred one is using an Xbox 360 Wireless Controller with an Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows. This is the cheapest way to go if you already have a wireless controller. Your other option is to get a wired Xbox 360 Controller which will plug directly into your USB port and off you go.
All you need to do to get your Xbox game to compile for windows is to right click on the project in the Solution Explorer and say "Create a Copy of Project for Windows".
Play some other Xbox games and pay attention to button presses especially in the menu system. When you?re playing a game on Xbox, the button presses become second nature and you may not even think about them. Make sure that your game follows these conventions.
Play other Xbox Live Community Games, preferably the more popular ones. Pay attention to game flow and how they implement their trial mode.
The other major effort was to implement storage properly and gamer services. This can be pretty involved just because there are so many combinations. The player can be not logged in, logged in but not logged into Live, logged in to Live but not allowed to purchase, and someone could sign in or sign out at any time during the game. As for storage, someone may have a hard drive, or a memory unit, or both, and may remove or insert the memory unit while the game is in progress.
Check out Spyn Doctor's Evil Checklist for stress testing. It contains many things to look out for and suggestions on how to avoid these pitfalls.
Most importantly, submit your game for Playtest before release. Even if you think the game is solid, playtest will probably flush out a few bugs that may even be missed in peer review, and then you would have a buggy game going out to the public. You only have one chance to make a good first impression.
Speaking of this, one issue I ran into was that since storage doesn't carry over from Trial mode to Full Game mode, I disabled high scores in Trial mode. This led players to believe that the game didn't have high scores support and this cost me some sales. The next release will have high scores enabled in Trial mode but tells users that they won't carry over. So it's very important to make sure that in trial mode the user knows exactly what's in the full version and you represent all of its features.
I?m thrilled to announce that Dr. Popper has passed peer review and is now available through Xbox Live Community Games for only 200 points. It has all of the game modes from the Silverlight version plus improved graphics, background music, and a free trial mode. Here is the link to the game on xbox.com:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550147/
and a screenshot of Extreme mode:
I?m also pleased to announce that it?s currently #2 in popularity for puzzle games in Xbox Live Community Games and #8 overall. So give it a try, tell your friends, and thanks for your support!
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550147/
Almost there... if anyone who follows my blog is a Creators Club Premium member with and Xbox who hasn't peer reviewed Dr. Popper yet, please do. So close and yet so far.
Thanks!
I'm pleased to announce that I've submitted the Xbox version of Dr. Popper for release on Xbox Live Community Games. So now once enough people have peer reviewed it successfully, it will move to the marketplace.
So I ask that anyone who has a creators club membership and has benefitted from these tutorials or just doesn't mind doing me a favor to please go ahead and peer review the game here:
http://catalog.xna.com/en-US/GameDetails.aspx?catalogEntryId=d06298ba-da3b-45fd-8432-0a54b1ff34e8&type=1
It's been an interesting experience getting a game ready for XLCG, and it?s taken more effort than the original game took, I'll share the experiences in a post mortem here soon.
I'm pleased to announce that I have successfully got my Dr. Popper game running on Zune. Here is a screenshot:
If you're reading this blog, hopefully you already have XNA 3.0 installed. If not, you'have to install it to play this game.
More here: http://www.bluerosegames.com/xna101/page/Dr-Popper-for-Zune.aspx