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[In this piece, GamerBytes editor Ryan Langley analyzes performance data and sales for Xbox Live Indie Games in 2009 -- and concludes the Xbox 360 service is becoming a much more promising way for developers to reach console gamers with hobbyist titles.]

We've been keeping a close eye on the Xbox Live Indie Games scene for some time now, and while it had a bit of a rough beginning, we’ve seen numerous additions to the service: a ratings system, Avatar support, an entirely new name, and new pricing tiers. Finding the sweet spot for hobbyist and user-submitted indie games has been a long process, but there's definitely been some progress.

Major Nelson may have released the Top 20 XBL Indie games for 2009, but it’s thanks to the participants of the official XNA forums -- including many of the developers -- that we have sales data for their games over the year, and thus a much clearer picture.

The below graph shows the sales of the games, the amount of trial versions of the game that were downloaded, the conversion percentage from trial to sale, the price and the money made by the developer itself.

The money made by a developer on any XBLIG game is 70% of its selling price – Microsoft picks up 30% of each sale:

The Win Of ZOMBIES!

It’s not much of a surprise to see James Silva's GAM3 W1TH ZOMB1ES become the top selling game of the year. It’s an incredibly simple game, but also follows numerous traits of the top tier Indie games – a bizarre style, a weird song and an extremely low price. All of these points brought the game to the attention of gamers and game blogs everywhere – Kotaku, Joystiq, and many major news sutes mentioned it. And it had a personality, alongside being a pretty decent game.

The Rise Of The Application

One thing that has certainly gotten a lot of attention on Indie Games are applications. An application's not a game, per se, but something akin to iPhone's non-game Apps – simple programs that allow players to make use of their systems outside of gaming itself.

DrumKit allows players to take control of Rock Band or Guitar Hero drums without the official games. Aquarium HD and myFishTank turn Xbox 360s into habitats for digital fish, and Rumble Massage and A Perfect Massage let users go crazy with the controller’s rumble ability.

It may frustrate those who make “real” games to see these applications do so well, but it makes perfect sense, as many people are drawn to simple, alternative and inexpensive apps. Compare with the Fireplace DVDs, which cost 10 times as much money. Even the guy who made RC-Airsim has stated that any other simulation of remote control aeroplanes will ask for nearly $100 for it, so asking $2.50 for RC-AirSim is a bargain by comparison.

And ezmuze+, which is a pretty complex audio looping system, made it to the list even at the $10 asking price. People aren't afraid of spending big money on Xbox Indies - but developers have to give people a reason to buy it at asking price.

The Simple Game

Other games that have done well are usually simple but direct – Headshot and Headshot 2 are among the top sellers on the system, while Avatar Drop and The Impossible Game, being very simple concepts, have also made it into the Top 20. By proving they're worth their asking price, they have enticed the player to click that “Buy Now” button at the end of the trial.

Those That Missed Out

Other developers also appeared on the XNA.com forums to discuss their Xbox Live Indie Games sales, revealing their 2009 sales and trial downloads to get a better understanding of the full spectrum of XBLIG creators.

Some games that we’re big fans of, including Solar and Weapon Of Choice, did quite well for themselves. For some perspective, they’ve actually done better than some Xbox Live Arcade games (albeit XBLA games that will never make their development costs back) that we’ve been following in our sales data.

There have been some games that have not sold well, but there's usually a reason – poor marketing, dull premise or bad box artwork. There are plenty of issues out there that can damage sales, but the idea that weak sales are the fault of the service doesn’t hold as much water as it once did.

A Bit Of Perspective

The Xbox Live Indie Scene has been catching some flack lately over less-than-epic game sales, but let's put this into a bit of perspective.

Solar, which is one of the coolest Xbox Indie titles out there, has sold around 10,000 copies over its 9 months on the market. The Xbox 360 version of the game took around 4 months of work during the developer’s spare time. For the most part the game was sold at its original $2.50 price point, so overall it made a bit less than $17,500.

$17,500 for 4 months of work is good money. That’s over a grand per week for that game's development. Now, obviously, that wouldn't support a larger team working full time, but even something like Lacrosse 2010 has done well for itself, considering the small coterie who created it.

One of the main criticisms of the XBLIG space is also that people just aren’t looking at it. But the numbers are certainly increasing - 55,000 people downloaded the trial to Little Racers, 26,000 people have trialed Avatar Snowball fight, and NextWar had 30,000 people give it a go. People are looking at games, especially those in the top 20 lists, but it’s up to the developers to convince customers to make the purchase.

Just having them download the demo is a huge step – that means the premise has piqued their interest, or the box art has made the game look interesting, or that the developer has strong marketing skills.

But without good design underneath, the game won’t sell. That may be why a game like ZenHack only has a conversion rate of 3.5 percent while Groov has a rate of 25 percent, which is far higher than the usual rate you’d see on a trial-to-purchase.

Failure? Not Quite

To call Xbox Live Indie games a failure is short-sighted at this point. To expect the same top-line numbers as that of the iPhone’s App Store -- as some critics do -- is also ludicrous. The App Store is a different animal. Top games sell up to 30,000 copies a day, but often at bargain basement prices - and the vast majority of sell very few.

Other comparison points, such as indie PC games on Steam aren't necessarily appropriate either. However, the ecosystem in terms of release volume is partway between XBLA and the App Store, perhaps -- it's worth noting that, since there's only one or two Xbox Live Arcade games released weekly, developers are guaranteed at least a little prominence.

Yet for XBLIG titles, games can get lost in the shuffle quite swiftly after they disappear from the 'New Releases' page. After that, they can't do much to get back up - or at least, price cuts like those implemented in the App Store seem to have less of an effect. This leads to situations like a game that sold 21 units in the first month, when the larger, more professional developer needs 10,000 to break even, ouch.

Can there still be criticism of XBLIG? Sure, there are several things that Microsoft could be doing to increase awareness of the Indie Games section, as mentioned in a recent article by Boing Boing but they can’t do everything. Developers need to keep the awareness up. I’ll mention again an article I wrote some time ago – send out press releases to weblogs, create trailers, Twitter about it, get on NeoGAF, IndieGames.com and TIGSource and talk about your games. The more people you get to download your demo, the more purchases you ultimately get - simple, but the majority of developers aren't doing that.

And meanwhile, at least for mid and high-level performers, XBLIG is becoming a viable platform for hobbyists and single-man shops to make some cash and get their game seen - and for end users to pick up some genuinely interesting games.

I've been sleeping a lot due to a mono infection I got from sharing my orange juice with a homeless little girl two months ago, otherwise I would have gotten this out sooner. Last weekend was the EVA '09 conference here in Buenos Aires, and this was the best year ever. Each year keeps getting better, but this year I think was the sweet spot where the conference had international flavor, speakers, and business opportunities but was still small enough (maybe 500 people) to be fun, much like the Austin conference back in 2003 or GDC back in like, the 90s. Speakers included Nick Fortugno, Ian Bogost and local legend, Dan Benmergui, Chris Hecker was going to stop by but chaos intervened, I'll have an interview of him posted later this week.

Nick gave a great workshop on Friday, he was saying that nobody knows anything and the best thing to do is just get something playable out as fast as possible so you can kill it and move on to the next iteration. Guessing at balance values or having a "discussion" about it will mostly waste your time. I'm glad somebody came down and told everyone this, my impression, at least from where I was working, is that too much discussion and not enough actual game design goes on in this industry, both in Argentina and abroad. I had the pleasure of teaming up with some great people including a reader of this blog, and we jammed out a board game about Monsanto that I named Gene Mob, which is like Reversi meets The McDonald's Game meets Dice Wars. I may produce a Flash version with one of the people I worked with. Now that's a workshop! I know that you get out of it what you put in, and I've changed a lot since 2008, but I got more out of that than I got out of the equivalent 2-day dealie preceeding GDC. Great job Nick! (Its come to my attention that Nick keeps a criticism journal online, mostly focusing on AAA rather than indie games, check it out.)

The expo was just one floor, with all the local companies showing off their stuff. I was pleased to see a project I worked on in a near-Beta state and playing pretty well. The production values have certainly increased around here, along with the size of the employment based and the number of companies, though I couldn't help but warn people that "peak industry grow" might be right around the corner and that they should focus on design and burrowing into a distinct audience niche. Trends never just keep going in a straight line without at least pulling back.

I didn't catch too many talks, I'm usually networking like crazy instead of consuming pre-planned content whenever I got to conferences. I did have the pleasure of watching the trifecta of talks at the end given by the keynote speakers. Daniel's talk was in spanish but I got the jist of it and imposed my own ideas on the rest. He was talking about different ways that indie developers have made a financial link directly to their fans and gotten a pretty decent living out of it, he himself has made about $18,000 USD off of Today I Die and I Wish I Were The Moon between the sponsorships, a porting deal and a few other misc. sources, down here that kind of money is basically two years living expenses if you spend lightly, which is why I'm convinced this city will mature into an indie paradise, exceeding Austin and Montreal, as economic conditions warrant migration for those trying to be furry animals instead of dinosaurs. Ian talked about the diversity of the "medium's" potential, from art to tool (I put "medium" in quotes because I don't want to upset Frank Lantz, remember, it's not really a medium, it's a high). A lot of companies down here, some of which I'll be meeting with in the near future, are doing advergames and serious games on a work-for-hire basis, so I imagine those ideas can only prove helpful. Nick's talk balanced that out nicely with emphasis on craft, difficulty, complexity, and how many clicks-per-minute is the right amount for a particular target audience.

Oh, and the Sony party was sweet. You've got to hand it to Sony, they do provide great free food and beer. Lets join hands and give thanks.

On a personal note, I was inspired to try my hand at teaching after talking to lots of young people and realizing that there is gross under-emphasis on hardcore system design in the repertoire around here. A lot of these kids have the right idea, it is culturally acceptable to live with your parents here so you can enjoy basically zero expenses beyond maybe an engine license, and that means infinite creative freedom, all they need are the tools. This place could become the next Scandinavia, I'm telling you.

[Our own Brandon Sheffield sat down with Nippon Ichi president and COO Souhei Niikawa and Disgaea team development lead Masahiro Yamamoto to discuss the SRPG-focused company's new PSP game, as well as its philosophy and operating practices.]

For over 15 years, Japanese developer and publisher Nippon Ichi Software has been releasing hardcore-targeted RPGs, particularly strategy RPGs like the successful Disgaea series.

Most recently, the team behind Disgaea has announced its newest game, Zettai Hero Kaizou Keikaku (which Siliconera translates as Absolute Hero Modding Project), a PSP dungeon-crawling action RPG that -- like many other Nippon Ichi games -- features plenty of randomly-generated content.

We talked with NIS president and COO Souhei Niikawa and Disgaea team development lead Masahiro Yamamoto to discuss the small company's attitude toward game development, its RPG success, and why throwing characters is such a big deal in its titles:

Your focus has been on RPGs, particularly Disgaea. Where will you focus going forward?

Souhei Niikawa: Well, RPGs remain a popular genre for the hardcore audience, so I think that RPGs will still be a central part of our strategy.

Disgaea is certainly an important title for Nippon Ichi. We'll continue to grow that game by doing what's best for that particular series. Placing our fortunes on nothing but Disgaea wouldn't be right at all. For example, we want to grow this new game in the same way that we've grown Disgaea. We want to make games that are different from Disgaea, of course, but sell just as well as that.

A lot of Nippon Ichi's character designs have "moe" and "loli" elements. Will that continue? Has for the market for that become smaller?

SN: We made games for the people who play them. If the audience's needs shift away from moe or loli, then we'd certainly go with a different design. We still think there's a demand for that, though, so it will probably continue. From the creator's perspective, we think it's very important to keep trying new things, and as a result, we naturally don't want to stick with any one thing for too long.

What made you adopt that style in the beginning? Did it start out with what the development team liked?

SN: Yes. Well, it's undeniable that a large part of our audience is what people would call game otaku, or hardcore game fans. So we want to make what they want, but at the same time, we're all pretty hardcore too. So, there's that. (laughs)

The first Disgaea really seemed to be designed around picking up and throwing characters. That influenced the rest of the dungeon design and combos in battle. Would you agree with that?

SN: Certainly. Well, not just with Disgaea, but it's been an important aspect of a lot of our games, including this one here. It's been that way from around that time.

It's sort of a Nippon Ichi trademark.

SN: Yeah. We're all about throwing people. (laughs) Using that as a vital tactical tool.

Where did the idea for that come from?

SN: The original task before us was to figure out how this game would be different from the rest. We needed some strong and unique gameplay aspect that would give this project some sort of individual hook. I think it's something that's worked, as you can see how the series has progressed from 1 to 3.

Masahiro Yamamoto: I don't really remember the individual process that led to the pick-up-and-throw idea, but we were coming up with all kinds of ideas to put in the game and make it unique.

The original Disgaea is full of original little ideas like that, but it's undeniable that the throwing system is the idea that stuck out the most in gamers' minds once it came out. It's the result of that kind of thought process.

Just thinking about it by itself, it's hard to conceptualize how it'd be fun. How did you decide that the feature was so important to have?

MY: Well, we're a very small company, and none of the teams behind our projects is particularly large. That structure allows individuals to test out assorted ideas pretty quickly as they come up with them, then show them around to see what the rest of the team thinks.

I don't think that teams the size of what you have for Final Fantasy would be able to try out such risky things within development. I think that's one of the merits of having a small company like ours; it's easier to try new challenges, and that's how a lot of features in our games are born.

You go through a lot of iterations.

MY: I think so, yeah.

How much content is too much for one game? With the item world, you could keep going forever. How do you know when to stop?

SN: I guess you could say it's when we feel like there's nothing left to add to the gameplay.

MY: Oh, we never really stop. (laughs) We put so much stuff into each project, and eventually we get to a point where we ask ourselves, "Do we really need all this?"

When a majority of staffers start answering, "I'm not sure" to that question, that's when we stop. (laughs) That's pretty much how it works.

We really think that having a lot to explore in our games is very important -- especially with the Disgaea series, where it's become kind of a hallmark. Of course, we definitely can't take that approach with all of our titles; instead, we find different ways of making the games engaging and fun to our audience.

I was wondering if you're concerned that if you give too much, there might not be any need to buy sequels.

MY: That's not really much of a worry to us. The way we see it, in fact, most of audience goes through our games pretty quickly, especially the really hardcore people who support the Disgaea series. It's really something, the amount of time they put into playing our stuff. I wouldn't call it a big worry.

Nippon Ichi is pretty much the only game company in Gifu Prefecture. Do you think your company has any regional flavor since you're isolated from other developers?

SN: Well, the Internet is everywhere, and we're a game company, after all, so it's certainly not an inconvenience or anything.

I would say [our flavor] is not in the location so much as our style of company. Since we're kind of out in the country and have small development teams, that helps to add individuality to our games.

In Tokyo, you have a lot of developers who have gone from company to company, quitting one job and picking up another one right off. I think the fact that we've not experienced that as much helps us keep consistent in the sorts of games we release.

Do your staffers come from all over Japan?

SN: Yes. We don't really headhunt from other companies or anything. Sometimes we hire new grads who apply to our company; sometimes we get people who have previous experience with other game companies.

Finally, when you start a new game, from what point do you begin -- an idea, a list of features? What is your jumping-off point?

MY: In the beginning, there's only an outline, a very general idea of what kind of game we want to make -- what kind of world we want, for example. Then things just expand off from there, and eventually we figure out what sort of genre would be best, like how this game turned out to be a dungeon RPG. That's how things begin.

Alec Holowka of Infinite Ammo (and half of Bit-Blot) closed the Indie Games Summit at GDC Austin with one of the best talks of the conference. Alec went on immediately following Twisted Pixel.  People were leaving as he took the stage, and Alec confidently called them out and thrust up two middle fingers to those leaving. [...] Continue reading