They got ”pushed to the side” says Refenes, and it ”totally f*cking hurt” the team’s feelings. Microsoft gave support ”in a very limited capacity.” PC sold more?
”We just kind of got pushed to the side, and that’s basically how the Xbox Live launch went,” said Refenes at the Game Develops Conference in San Francisco. ”We were just like ‘what the f***? Everyone else gets a free week except for us?’”
Costume Quest from Double Fine released the same week on XBLA as Super Meat Boy. Microsoft said they’d get the top billing for its launch, but there was no promotion.
”I was like ‘What’s the deal? Are you guys pulling out? Where’s our stuff?’,” he recalled.
”It finally went up half way through our launch day. It was the number four spot; it wasn’t number one. The ‘spooktacular sale’, which was a whole bunch of other games that already came out – that was the number one slot.”
”An ad for a Mazda 3 was the number two slot – because you all go on Xbox to figure out what car you want, right? We were number four and we stayed number four the entire week,” continue the studio boss.
Microsoft told them that the better it sold the more promotion it would receive on Xbox Live. Despite beating Comic Jumper and Hydrophobia by significant figures, and receiving top critical praise, no more support was given to them.
”It’s not supposed to hurt your feelings because it’s business, but it totally f**king hurt my feelings. Me and Ed just killed ourselves trying to get this game done and now we’re just pushed to the side,” said Refenes.
”It was a f** mindf***,” chipped in Team Meat co-founder Edmund McMillen.
”It was really confusing. At that point I think we were so f***** up in our heads from development, it almost felt like ‘are these people out to get us? What’s happening here? Did we do something wrong? Are they trying to screw us because we did something wrong?’”
It wasn’t all bad with Microsoft: ”Everybody that we could talk to were great; the people who we couldn’t talk to were the problem. So everyone who we worked with was wonderful. Everyone who was making decisions, not so much.”
The PC release of Super Meat Boy was much more successful and even outsold the XBLA version according to reports. It’s near 400k units sold on all platforms.
