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Xbox Live Indie Games: How To Survive

Some of the most successful XNA developers discuss how to score a hit on Microsoft's indie channel

For Matt Davis of Barker's Crest, creators of Avatar Golf, money wasn't the main motivation for becoming an XNA developer, but it certainly helps to justify the time spent working on his games.

"Money was not a very big factor at first and to a degree it still isn't," Davis told GamesIndustry.biz.

"If I didn't enjoy what I was doing I wouldn't do it at all. However, building the kind of games I do and being the only developer on the project requires a tonne of time and resources. It would make very little sense to invest the time and money that I do into these projects if there wasn't the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

"I'll not even go into the sacrifices family members make to help make these games a reality. It is nice to have a very understanding wife." With 600,000 combined trials and purchases of his games, Davis sees his XBLIG programming a sincerely professional pursuit, but is still very appreciative of the opportunities offered by the service.

It would make very little sense to invest the time and money into these projects if there wasn't the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Matt Davis, Barker's Crest

"The main advantage the XBLIG offers is giving the couch game developer the ability to sell one's game to hundreds of thousands of people all around the world. All while not having to worry about business issues like transaction fees, returns, exchange rate... the list goes on and on.

"While distribution channels like this are available on many other platforms XBLIG is the only one available to a hobbyist on a game console. I'm still blown away that Microsoft has made something like this available to us."

But is it seen as just a stepping stone to bigger and better things? Both Sawkins and Davis say they'll stick with it, essentially treating it as a full-time job, but for Steinke, the future may lay elsewhere.

"I am very interested in growing. I feel I am sort of hitting the upper bounds where I can grow on XBLIG. Currently my games make up 25 per cent of the top 20 selling titles on XBLIG, there aren't a lot of places to go from there.

"I would like to do some games that are worthy of a higher price point, on a marketplace that can sustain that. For instance I would love to the opportunity to make an XBLA game."

With its community ratings, low barriers to entry and minimal price points, XBLIG has more than a little in common with the App Store - something which Sawkins says he feels it increasingly resembles. Whilst he feels that storefront is "very well designed", the App Store is also renowned for less auspicious reasons, like burying great content and a lack of curation.

So was the XBLIG designed to capture the sort of casual zeitgeist which Apple's marketplace generated so profitably?

"Xbox Live Indie Games was formed with the idea of democratising the publication process on Xbox 360," a Microsoft spokesperson explains.

"By offering free tools, support, and a peer-review process through App Hub, we have provided developers with all the resources they need to launch a game on Xbox 360."

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