The reaction to this among the XNA community fell into roughly two camps. The first is exemplified by developer Running Pixel, behind Bricks4Ever and Crystal Crush: ‘I’m really disappointed. With two games on the service, and one on the top for three weeks we did... not enough to recoup nothing [sic], there’s no business here’. Both Running Pixel games are, in the context of the service, polished efforts – but they’re also working within the doggedly explored realms of the match-three and bat-and-ball genres.

The alternative reaction came from developers such as Anchorcast, the maker of below-par platformer A Fading Melody, who admitted that ‘it won’t pay my bills, but it’s still a nice chunk of change that will help pay my bills, and this is from less than a week at around ninth place on the charts. I’m cool with that [and] if you were expecting this to be more than a hobby/secondary income for most developers, you probably had your hopes too high’.


_{^{Word Soup, a word-based puzzle game}}

There’s the rub. A number of developers do expect CG to be a business rather than a secondary income, and the fear is that there’s a flood of novelty apps in the service’s future. The developers of CarneyVale Showtime didn’t respond to an interview request, while the game’s sales have been kept private, and it’s not hard to see why: it was developed over a period of just under five months by a team of seven people. CarneyVale Showtime is a great game, and perhaps the highlight of the service thus far, but it seems incredibly unlikely it’s yet covered its development costs. Bemoaning this fate is natural, but could it have been different? Is it right to expect the CG channel to support professional creators, or just wrongheaded? Comparing two of the more professional efforts and their relative successes shows how, money’ and an abundance of stories which service, and one on the top for three weeks with the right product, CG certainly can support a small business. Word Soup, a puzzle game, has made over $32,000 (£22,000), while Weapon Of Choice, a side-scrolling shooter, hasn’t recouped development costs. The real difference between Word Soup and Weapon Of Choice? The former’s simply a better example of its genre, and its genre is better suited to the channel. Word Soup has high production values, works exactly as you would expect it to, costs 400 points and doesn’t have an obvious competitor on XBLA. Weapon Of Choice is a garish and clunky shooter with counter-intuitive controls and several poorly thought-out mechanics, sells for 400 points, and has XBLA competition from the likes of Super Contra, which not only has the name recognition and nostalgia factor, but is fundamentally a better game and sells for the same price. This isn’t rocket science.

There’s a more general point here concerning the types of games CG can support. Side-scrolling shooters, twin-stick shooters, beat ’em ups, clones of popular genres and particular types of puzzlers are already over-represented on XBLA, and with some of the finest examples of those genres. Austin points out that “XBLA was launched with the 360, and even though we had a great launch line-up, it was still only competing against 20 retail titles. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of retail games, hundreds of XBLA games, so CG is in a place where the Xbox consumer has tons of content choices – CG is in a much tougher competitive situation than XBLA was at launch.” Or, in other words, what’s the point in CG trying to compete with XBLA games? “Because Groov’s a dual-stick shooter I immediately think of Geometry Wars,” says developer Julian Kantor, “so I’m thinking it’s not going to sell for 800, but between 400 and 200. And is it as good as the original Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved which you can get for 400 points? I was like, ‘Nah’. As a gamer, I think the gameplay in Geometry Wars is way better, even though the point of Groov isn’t necessarily to go up against that. I approached making it differently, as a kind of musical experience, and I’d originally categorised it as a music game which I changed.” This is the key difference between a game like Biology Battle and Groov: the former developed by a full team, confronting Geometry Wars head on, and priced at 800 points; the latter developed by one man, a distinctive twist on the dual-stick shooter, and priced at 200 points.


_{^{Julian Kantor's Groov}}

At least Biology Battle’s a decent enough game. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that, in general terms, many of these poor-selling games don’t deserve sales success. Even if most aren’t awful, they’re often presented as such, with poor promo art, unconvincing sales blurb and insipid titles. Presented with what seems to be a badly organised collection of second-rate clones, the average browser’s first impression of the service can’t help but be a negative one. How many XNA developers follow Microsoft’s guidelines for what a player expects? How many games have easy-to-figure-out controls and rules during the trial period? How many have clear in-game visuals? How many were promoted at all? How many are even appropriately priced? Having played a great deal of CGs during the production of this article, our answer to each question is: almost none.

The responsibility is clearly on CG developers themselves to learn from the first six months. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement from Microsoft. Why, in particular, has CG disappeared from the NXE ‘Spotlight’ section? Why have so few titles been highlighted since launch? “When the NXE first launched there was a link to CG right there,” says Kantor, “but since then they’ve made it less prominent. I think Microsoft almost tries too hard to make everything equal – it’s like they’re almost scared to call out specific games for being really good. They did it with CarneyVale Showtime but it had already won a contest so I guess maybe they felt safe to promote it?”