WARNING - I AM ABOUT TO TRY AND CONVINCE YOU TO WRITE ANOTHER XBLIG GAME. BECAUSE I REALLY LIKE THE LOOK OF YOUR GAME!
FunInfusedGames wrote:I'd love to make it for XBLIG because I love being able to play this on your living room TV and with four players, but as a whole XBLIG sales have been bad. Hypership Still Out of Control has sold less than 300 copies total on XBLIG... about as much as the iOS version of Hypership sold in the first couple days. Even if the last game had sold a few thousand copies, I could probably justify it to myself, but not at a few hundred.
I think this is probably your biggest gripe with XBLIG. For what it's worth - Chronoblast isn't looking in much better shape, it's hit 506 in its first 8 days and it's fallen off newly released. We are no longer in the era of Shoot-1-Up being a contest finalist with a massive pair of tits on the box art getting it a lot of attention. We're in the era where MS are trying to shift Indie Games as far to the back as possible - for reasons best not gone in to here.... Anyway - I got the usual downvoting shit that everyone and their dog suffers from on the USA marketplace these days - but had a #1 spot for a day which actually helped sales. It pretty much disappeared in to the depths of XBLIG hell after that. This isn't even a months rent after a couple of years of working on this between jobs. But I never set my expectations higher than even 100-200 sales at best. Honestly, I didn't think anyone would care.
If you need an example of what I mean:
Sales went diagonally UP on a graph. Ratings went diagonally DOWN on a graph. Does that strike you as remotely logical? The only scenario would be that people who didn't like it went "Okay, 2-3 stars because it just wasn't my thing" and everyone who actually liked the game was too busy playing it. Since then - the players have been rating it fairly and it's actually crawling back up - but the first week is usually hell for any XBLIG developer. In the UK I'm ranked #4, in Japan I'm ranked #10. USA? Irrelevant. You know how it is - you know precisely how "vicious" it can get.
In that sense, I can completely understand your reasons for not wanting to do XBLIG stuff. Is it for the love of the genre, or financial gain? The latter being the reason most people wont support things like Tate - because they consider it "too niche" or even bother with:-
In addition to that, the peer-to-peer score sharing system sucks on XBLIG. I wrote my own client / server webservice setup for Bad Caterpillar (Android version) that I can use for Hypership 2 as well. Competing for high scores is half the fun and I can't do that as well as I'd like on XBLIG.
This.. which I actually have to strongly disagree with. However, I can only disagree with that up to a point. The biggest flaw with XBLIG is that we cannot punch out of the XBLA Garden Wall as I like to call it. There is no way to talk to my box sitting in my rack at the datacenter over some arbitrary port with even a simple web request. Simply cannot be done.
However, that said - I think a lot of it comes down to how much you're prepared to support high scores in your game. I've spoken to a lot of people who want to write or work on shmups who actually say "Well I don't give a shit about scoring" and genuinely don't care about leaderboards at all. I'm quite happy hosting high scores for periods of 24-48 hours and taking my xbox session down for development for a day. The reason being that when I'm offline - people who are playing, are seeding the high scores to other people. When I put it back on, there's usually another player within an hour.
It's a fully redundant system. Yes, we've had scores go missing temporarily. Then we've had scores be retransmitted back to us within an hour. Shit happens, you can't stop it - but there's no reason to completely avoid doing high scores.
If we had the ability to talk to our own servers outside of XBLA - a peer to peer system would add an extra level of redundancy to that single homed solution. Basically, if you're prepared to support your games score system by actually
running a service then this isn't a problem. Because really, the only major gripe comes down to the fact that you might enter in to a scenario where for 60 minutes of some poor bastards life - scores are out of sync. If that one guy bitches about it - that one guy is more than welcome to bitch at me directly and I shall bore him to tears with over half a decades experience in the ISP industry talking about the absolutely ridiculously batshit infrastructure required to provide 99.9999% uptime.
There might be 60 minutes where your datacenter have to perform routine maintenance, or you might lose routing to your box temporarily. Ultimately, a shmup on xblig is gonna be a $1 game.
Also, to be perfectly realistic and look at this from a gamer perspective - if there's a guy whos scores go missing and he's got 40,000 points ranked right down in the bottom 10 players - his score disappearing for a few moments is honestly a drop in the ocean. If he ever starts playing for score to the point where he's legitimately caring about his scoreboard ranking (i.e practising for more than 3-4 minutes) -- then he's going to receive a retransmission at some point during his play time and there's a very high probability that it will contain his (rather low) score! So he's not going to lose out in a way he's going to get upset over long term. The higher scoring players generally put more time in to the game - so are in fact contributing more time to the score system. The highest score on the leaderboard has gone missing once and it was re-received within 20 minutes without me actually having to ask anyone. This is largely why I'm not overly panicked about my bizarre save corruption bug - because the system surrounding it is robust enough to recover so long as people are playing the game. If people are not playing the game anymore - then scores are pretty much irrelevant and if you want to play the game at that point - I'll have an online ranking system you can go compare yourself against. Re: the saving bug.. I'm simply trying to make it not do that, because having a broken feature is basically completely bollocks...
At the time of writing this I can see that I've just transmitted over 150 scores to at least 3 other players - one of whom was a new player. So those scores are perfectly safe.
Now, will you please come back to XBLIG? Pretty please? That was the whole point of this rant. To convince you it can still be a fun place... I'll even give it a proper Peer Review it for you!
Anyway, I'm going to go and play the original. Since it looks fun. I'm also going to go and give it a nice rating.
:0)
p.s - I completely understand if you're leaving for financial reasons!
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