Microsoft’s Xbox Live Community Games market won’t provide a ”financially viable” avenue for teams says Clover developer Binary Tweed.
The size of the marketplace is ”prohibitively small” to be able to return decent monies to developers, adding they ”definitely won’t recoup costs” for Clover through XBLCG alone.
The idea behind Microsoft’s XNA tools were to, and try not to laugh, ‘democratise’ game development so that top rated games would get attention and financial reward for its creators.
”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,” Binary Tweed’s Daniel Jones tells 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 fact that it doesn’t limit the release of ‘games’ to actually being ‘games’ is causing a problem he points out, it’s too open-platform for its own good.
”The problem is that the Community Games market is just too small, and the people buying titles via the service don’t seem at all interested in games,” he said.
Jones noted though it’s better to push a saleable game like Clover through something like XBLCG, rather than just shove a demo in publisher faces. ”Although I can’t talk about specifics at the moment, Clover’s critical acclaim has opened doors to Binary Tweed.”
See the trailer below for Binary Tweed’s Clover.
