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Clover Dev Questions Financial Viability Of XBLCG

Tom Ivan's picture

By Tom Ivan

June 24, 2009

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Binary Tweed managing director Daniel Jones says that the company is now looking at the Xbox Live Community Games service as an “arena for proving concepts” rather than as a money-making space.

His comments come after underwhelming sales of the developer’s adventure platform puzzle title Clover, which retails for 400 MS Points (£3.40) on Microsoft’s XNA-based amateur games creation platform.

"It's a shame to say that Clover has not sold as many copies as we'd hoped for. As it stands, through Community Games alone, we definitely won't recoup costs," he told Digital Spy.

"Frustratingly enough, the critical reception to the game has been good... The size of the XBLCG market is prohibitively small to be financially viable, so I can only see it being of use to Binary Tweed as an arena for proving concepts.

"The people buying titles via the service don't seem at all interested in games," he said. "In the first week of Clover's release, the top ten CG titles was made of eight applications, RC-AirSim (which seems to be having a self-fulfilling prophecy at the top) and one edutainment game."

As featured recently in our extensive overview of Community Games’ first six months, a number of developers approached CG as a primary business opportunity rather than as a secondary income maker, with mixed results.

Microsoft recently announced plans to change the name of Community Games to Xbox Live Indie Games.

nolim's picture
On June 25th nolim said:

I think that when publishing on Community games it is essential that you grab the attention of the player in the crucial eight minutes of free play that the demo provides. Having heard of Clover before its release i was quite excited when i saw it up on the community games channel, i quickly downloaded the demo and, after playing the first eight minutes three of four times, trying different approaches with each play through, found that i had completely lost interest in the game. Perhaps it was because the games slow paced puzzle solving didn't allow me to achieve very much in the short time i had before needing to pay for more, and maybe, just maybe, i'd have been hooked if Binary Tweed had thought to allow me to do more than just slowly wander from place to place hoping to achieve resolution of at least one puzzle before my eight minutes ticked away. I'm not saying it was a bad game, just that lack of foresight regarding that time limit meant that without paying for it i will simply never know.