Indie Game Developer Finds Success On Xbox 360 -- Est. $825K Sales In First Week

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At $15 per game, that’s $825,000 in first week gross sales. Microsoft takes a cut -- we don't know how much -- but that's still a really impressive debut.

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I think Microsoft takes a 33% cut.

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Jonathan said that with his projected sales (which he didn’t break out), he should be able to make game developing a full-time gig.

For half a million (post-MS but pre-IRS) dollars I'd consider quitting my day job and giving it, oh, say five years of a shot.

Many have feared recently that smaller game developers would be pushed out of the business; clearly, with better and better graphics expected out of games and development costs shooting through the roof, they wouldn't have a chance, would they?

But the irony of it all is that the exact opposite seems to be happening: sick of complicated, high-budget, high-price yet often low-quality games, gamers are looking for simpler but more innovative and interesting games to hold their attention.

This is even happening in the non-indie scene; look how wildly popular Portal was, despite the fact that it was a 5-hour $20 game made by the small team behind Narbacular Drop, with some extra resources from Valve. If anything, its release far overshadowed the higher-profile and higher-budget Half-Life Episode 2.

Of course, the biggest chance for indie developers to make their debut is in genres that are classically inexpensive to develop games for: strategy games, adventure games, old-fashioned RPGs, shooters, etc. One example of this is the wildly popular (at least in Japan) Touhou shmup series; a total of 7 PC shooter games (plus the 5 older PC-98 games) all made by a single developer, despite the fact that he has a day job, too. The games are so successful that there's an entire convention each year dedicated solely to products related to his games--and yet despite the success, the only ones involved in production are that single developer and his many, many beers.

Xbox Live Arcade is a perfect ground for promoting such games; if you put a low-priced game that looks interesting in front of the eyes of tens of millions of people with points to spend, you're sure to get loads of sales.

Live Arcade is typically 70/30 (70 for developer), but it's negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Hope he got more!

Note that this isn't a "crap-out-a-game-make-a-mil"; he was working on this game for, I believe, 5-ish years.

(worth buying and playing, btw)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game) has a basic description of the game itself.

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3169204 and http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/braid/review.html are some good reviews of the game.

For my part, I'll be playing it this weekend.

And now the VCs come calling.