Weapon of Choice by Mommy's Best Games - available on XBLA's Community Games.
Part Four: Community
The disadvantage of Community Games, is, in a word, exposure. No place does Kieron Gillen’s urge to indie developers ring more true than here, where the most popular games listed on the Community Games section today involve an RC Plane simulator, two games devoted to using the 360 controllers as a massage device, and two games devoted to – and I’m not making this up – farting. Seriously. Releasing your game on Live’s Community Games is like becoming the latest new webcomic, or, to refer to the initial example, the new kid in school. The rating system to differentiate your game from the lot is underdeveloped, and good games can get lost in the shuffle.
Weapon of Choice, the first title released by Mommy’s Best Games (founded by Nathan Fouts, veteran of Insominac Games), sold far below expectations when released on Live’s Community Games section. Fouts’ detailed on his blog that while he never thought the game would sell enough to make him rich, he was hoping that it would sell at least 10,000 copies – a number he listed as the financial equivalent of “That Hurts” – but enough to fund future gaming projects. The game didn’t reach that level – a reality that seemed counter to Microsoft’s assertion at the 2009 GDC that “Several Community Games top sellers will be taking home more income from four months of sales than the average U.S. citizen earns in a full year.” Though resolved to keep going, Fouts wrote on the company blog that “Even while I was processing the low sales numbers I was almost annoyed with myself for being excited about waking up the next day to work on our next game,” and reported that after the associated taxes and costs, he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant for the future of the company.
Ironically enough, it was Fouts’ own report of these sobering sales figures that earned more media coverage of the situation… and increased the sales of Weapon of Choice dramatically. Working within the given promotional system of Live didn’t help, but when Mommy’s Best Games managed to attract outside attention, then matters seemed to improve. Of course the game had to deal with numerous other elements obstructing its path to success (as shown in the game’s Postmortem here), but it became immediately obvious that media coverage mattered… pulling the cycle full-circle. And while Fouts had to worry about selling enough copies to keep his business going, reports have come in (here, from Kotaku) that independent developers who create games for the WiiWare service do not even get paid if their game does not reach specific sales numbers (specifics here, again courtesy of Kotaku). While Nintendo does occasionally feature WiiWare games and promo videos on their “Nintendo Channel” service, the Channel itself is an isolated download, and the games themselves do not seem to receive any other attempts by Nintendo to promote them.
But here’s a new question: outside of a sales-dependent format like WiiWare, how many sales do you really need? One indie developer seems to have taken a different approach...
- R. Dobbs
Previously - Part One - The Press, Part Two - The PC, Part Three - The Consoles
Next Time - Part Five - The True Fan
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