For the first two days Inferno appears to be doing well.  It’s doing better than Crossfire and JoyJoy did early on.  By the time I return from vacation, it’ll very likely have more sales than Crossfire (but probably not more revenue yet) and a better conversion rate than JoyJoy.  But as with any game on XBLIG, it’s the long-haul that really matters, so I’m not jumping for joy, though it appears that going for $1 was the right thing to do.

While PAX has definitely had an effect on overall internet buzz, you can still check out some more great coverage of Inferno at IndieGames, DigitalQuarters, and Zeybod.

When I return from vacation, I’ll be working on a quick update for Inferno with a little extra PR push, finish up Fluid (should be out in September unless a publisher swoops in from nowhere–publishers: feel free to email me), and then do the long-needed update for Crossfire.

Inferno’s update will fix balancing on a couple enemies, give the bosses UI health meters, and fix a couple bugs that slipped through.

Crossfire’s update will be a little larger than originally planned, with some balancing changes for it as well.  Basically I’ll be trying to flatten out the difficulty curve a bit, so the game starts a little faster and ends a bit slower than it does now.  If I ever do Crossfire 2 (which I will), it’ll have multiple difficulty levels available at the start, including an easier one.

Until next week…

Inferno is also doing pretty well on the Top Rated list in the US, with a #12 ranking after 70 ratings.  So it’s already above JoyJoy and Crossfire, though I have no idea whether it’ll go up or down from there.  Just have to wait and see.

Anyway, here are a few reviews and mentions of the game so far:

DIYGamer Review
“Truly one of the most enjoyable multiplayer experiences I’ve had with an XBLIG game.”

AudioLog Review
“Inferno is not only their best title, but one of the best games on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel period.”

Inside 360 Review (German)
“I almost dare to write that Inferno invents the twin-stick shooter genre new!”

NeoGAF September XBLIG thread
“It’s excellent, easily my favourite radianGames game and bought instantly.”

GamerBytes Mention
“An amazing looking dual-stick RPG/shooter.”

What is Inferno?  It’s Gauntlet meets Geometry Wars (more like JoyJoy really, but I’ll use what other people will call it).  It’s an action RPG with twin-stick shooting.  1-4 players, 30 levels, collect gold, upgrade your ship, destroy everything in your path.  It’s about 2 hours long not counting the bonus mode (New Game+), and it’s only 1 dollar.

Before I discuss the price, here are the important links:

The Inferno Launch Trailer

The First Review

The Marketplace Page (queue up the game for download to your 360)

So why is the biggest and longest game I’ve done for XBLIG only $1 instead of $3 or $5?  Part of it is an accident.  Inferno wasn’t supposed to be this big, but I didn’t like the first direction the game was going, and switched after a week or so to be more Gauntlet-like.

The real answer is because of JoyJoy and Crossfire.  In the ensuing discussion after I posted sales numbers in late July, something stuck in my head after thinking about what the comments said: Games that have very high conversion rates (sales vs. downloads) are also very highly rated.  The higher rated a game is (position #1 on the chart is many times more valuable than position #20), the more long-term sales a game will have.

While Crossfire had a better launch in terms of revenue compared to JoyJoy, it wasn’t as much as I expected, and most of that was due to it getting 50% more downloads.  Once the launch hype settled down, JoyJoy continued to get ~110 downloads a day while Crossfire got around ~60.  Not only does JoyJoy sit higher on the Top Rated list in the US (#13 vs. #17 currently), but it also sits on more Top Rated lists around the world.

JoyJoy has a 31.2% lifetime conversion rate and Crossfire has a 13.2% lifetime conversion rate.  While that makes Crossfire a little more profitable per download, it’s just not getting enough downloads to compete with JoyJoy.  I believe that people who buy a game are more likely to rate it 5 stars even though I have no direct evidence of that.

So Inferno is $1.  The question is: Will it be worth it?

In addition to hoping for good things regarding Peer Review and sales, I’m also hoping that the Indie Games channel on the 360 also works without a hitch.  There have been quite a few issues with it this year.  When something small goes wrong, the Top Download list stops updating, hurting recent releases a bit.  This seems to happen every two weeks or so, but it wouldn’t have a major long-term effect on my sales.  When something major goes wrong, the New Release list doesn’t update while new games queue up waiting for release.

This very thing happened just last week.  For a number of days, it appeared there were no new releases, and then suddenly about 20 games came out within 24 hours.  This particular malfunction lead to a weak start for quality games like Gravitron360, while one developer reported his game was on the New Release list for only 19 hours.  Microsoft isn’t in the habit of “compensating” Indie Games creators the way they do for big publishers (with additional dashboard time for a screw-up on a paid DLC promotion, for instance), so if this happens, the indie developer is basically screwed.   There’s ways to sort of work around it if you pay attention and don’t get really unlucky, but it’s not a pleasant thing to have to worry about.

In keeping with the “mystery” of Inferno, I’m not announcing the price or releasing any real screenshots/video/etc until launch day.  Until then (hopefully)…

The scope of Inferno is way too big in retrospect.  I’m not sure what I’ll be doing after I finish Inferno, but I’ll probably try my hand at intentionally simpler games rather than ones that should really be on XBLA rather than XBLIG.  After doing a three-month game in one-and-a-half months, I’ll be aiming for some games that I think will take me a week to do.  The biggest thing I can imagine doing in the next few games is a sequel to JoyJoy or Crossfire.

I also have to think about what to do with Fluid (try harder to find a publisher or just wrap it up and put it on XBLIG), and that could include entry into the big competitions with deadlines in October (Independent Games Festival and the Indie Game Challenge).  But there’s no time to think right now.

What you see above is a partial screenshot from Inferno, aka Game #5.  Everyone who chimed in seemed to prefer that name over the others, and I’ve grown attached to it as well, so I’m going for it.

You may have noticed a reduced post frequency as of late.  There are a couple reasons for it.  The primary reason is that I’ve been working very hard on Inferno.  The scope of the game is on the large side for one of my games.  I’ve tried my best to keep it under control, and have thought a lot about whether certain things need to be in the game or not.  But I’ve also got to make a complete game that feels whole, and not every game is going to be as nicely compact as Crossfire was.

The other reason for the silence is that I’m going to try launching the game a little differently, with no early press release or debut trailer.  The screenshot above, and maybe some early box art, is about all I’ll be doing for early hype.  For reference, Crossfire had almost exactly a month between the debut trailer and launch, while JoyJoy was a little over two months.  Instead I’m going to focus more energy on just one large push right at launch.  It could work better, it could work worse, but either way it’ll keep me from spending so much time worrying about anything other than the quality of the game until I’m winding down the actual work on it.

I also wanted to let people know that there will be an update of Crossfire, but it probably won’t be until early October.  The major thing I’ll be doing is adding 3 modifiers to the game that can be used to make the game easier (while reducing your score a bit).  There will also be fixes to a few waves that were too hard and some other minor fixes.  I’ll give more details when the time is right.

Speaking of Crossfire, some additional reviews have trickled in over the past few weeks.  Here are links to them and some choice quotes:

Armless Octopus

“…one of the greatest arcade shooters in recent history.”

“…considering how tedious wave 48 is.” (Sorry!)

“Did I mention the soundtrack has some of the best techno music out there?”

Digital Quarters

“…a perfect evolution of a game more than three decades old.”

“…will eagerly purchase any game from this company day one from here on out.”

GayGamer

“Radiangames Crossfire might just be the best arcade style game on the 360 yet.”

SFX360 (JoyJoy and Crossfire combined review)

“Radiangames brings back the joy of 80’s arcade.”

Clark Nielsen

“Combined, these elements create a very fun and satisfying shooter that supports insane co-op play.”

IndieNerds (Video review)

Coming up with an appropriate name for a game can be difficult.  The three above are potential candidates for my next game (game #5).  The game is best described as Gauntlet meets Robotron, so Gauntletron is pretty descriptive though completely unoriginal.  The other two sound cool to me, and are sort of descriptive of the style, but neither describes the game well.

When a name feels right, such as with Crossfire and JoyJoy, it helps define the tone and direction of the game.  Those two names were apparent early on, so it made development just a little easier.  With game #5, I started with two potential directions to go (pure arcade experience or more exploration), chose to try the pure arcade experience first, then switched directions after a week or so of it not feeling quite right. 

The direction change has worked splendidly and the game’s functionality is nearly 100% complete, but the lack of a solid name lingers in the back of my mind as I begin working on the final visuals.  I can’t sit around waiting though, so I’ll forge on and hope something feels right.  Maybe it’s one of those above, or maybe it’s something else.

Before I get to the actual sales numbers for JoyJoy and Crossfire, I want to start with some supplementary graphs of visitors to this website and the soundtrack hosting website.  First the “Soundtrack Buzz”:

You’ll notice the timeframe only covers the launch of Crossfire (July 7th) and beyond.  That’s because of the ~1,200 visits the soundtrack pages have had, over 95% of them came after Crossfire launched.  With JoyJoy I sent out a separate release about the soundtrack being available, and it wasn’t free.  For Crossfire the soundtracks were made free to download and the announcement was included with the “Crossfire is out” announcements. 

The highest day was July 8th with 319 visitors, while July 11th also saw a big spike.  The July 8th spike was a combination of many websites including this one, though an article from The Examiner was the biggest referrer.  July 11th was mostly from a website called mysavings.com where both games’ soundtracks were listed because they’re free.  I don’t think the soundtrack site has any significant impact on sales, but perhaps over the long-term it’ll have a small positive impact due to multiple impressions of seeing Radiangames.

Here we have slightly more interesting data, aka unique daily visitors to this website since the beginning of the year.  I’ve noted the spikes in visitors with numbers.  #1 is the initial announcement of radiangames and JoyJoy.  #2 is a little less certain, but I believe it’s being linked by the creator of Monaco on his twitter feed shortly after he won the Independent Games Festival grand prize (I mentioned Monaco in a post-GDC recap).  #3 is a collection of smaller spikes marking the launch of JoyJoy.  #4 is the announcement of Crossfire, and #5 is the launch of Crossfire.

I think it’s a positive sign the spikes are now getting bigger and more sustained, along with the lower dips being higher as well.  It’s pretty much impossible to measure or detect an effect on sales since Xbox 360 browsing and web browsing are fairly exclusive, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my future releases have an advantage over similar games from new developers.

I don’t have graphs of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, but they’ve both been increasing at a steady but very slow rate.  On Twitter Radiangames has 60 followers, while on Facebook there are 135 fans of Radiangames.  While I mention both in my press releases, I don’t have them linked from this site, and I pretty much only use them to redirect people back to this site when I post a new entry.

Now onto the sales data, starting with JoyJoy’s long-term report:

* Click on sales charts to see slightly bigger, unsquished versions

This chart shows a typical sales curve for Xbox Live Indie Games: A large spike at the beginning, followed by a much steadier and lower amount of sales over a long period of time.  Nothing too surprising, but when we eliminate the early spike (cut out the first 4 days of sales), other patterns emerge that can be analyzed further:

Now it’s much easier to see the effect of events outside of the launch window.  The most significant event was getting selected for IGN Top Picks (in the 4th slot) for 3 weeks.  During this time, JoyJoy was easily visible in a location that required less work to find than its normal locations.  The rest of the time, JoyJoy was on the Top Rated charts and Contest Finalists list, but only in slots #11 and below (it moved around on Top Rated for a while).  Right now it’s currently located in slot #12 for both lists in the US (the US accounts for most sales/downloads).

For Crossfire, there are 12 days worth of data now:

It’s difficult to get any new information out of this graph compared to JoyJoy.  Crossfire launched towards the end of one sales report day (2:30PM CST), so the first day is only a fraction of one day.  If we compare numbers of JoyJoy and Crossfire, it’s a bit easier to see what has happened:

We can see again that shortly after Crossfire launched, JoyJoy experienced a small surge in downloads and sales.  Things have now evened out somewhat, with Crossfire on one main list (Top Rated #17 in the US) and JoyJoy on two.  Aside from Canada, JoyJoy is generally rated a little higher than Crossfire (the UK is the only significant territory where neither is in the Top 20).

Comparing the launch windows:

The first twelve days for both games show a sharp decline before leveling out a little above 100 downloads per day.  Crossfire had more initial downloads, but fewer daily sales due to a price of $3 instead of $1.  Crossfire’s user rating has steadied out around #17 in the US (sometimes going to #16 briefly) so far, so it will likely have fewer long-term downloads.  I’m slightly inclined to believe that Crossfire’s higher price has had a slightly negative effect on it’s user rating compared to JoyJoy, but it’s impossible to know that for sure.  The other likely explanation is the lack of online leaderboards being more noticeable in Crossfire (due to the nature of the game).

 Despite the outlook of JoyJoy’s downloads looking slightly better, it still appears that Crossfire will surpass JoyJoy in total revenue in a couple months.  Here’s a comparison of the totals so far:

JoyJoy (5/16 – 7/18)

Trials: 11,929

Purchases: 3,595

Conversion Ratio: 30.14 %

Gross Revenue: $3,595

Est. Actual Revenue: $2,445*

Crossfire (7/7-7/18)

Trials: 6,251

Purchases: 767

Conversion Ratio: 12.27 %

Gross Revenue: $2,301

Est. Actual Revenue: $1,565*

*Note: XBLIG Developers get 70% of the revenue from MS, though it comes out to around 68% due to how Microsoft Points are processed.

Given the data so far and data from previous games on XBLIG, the conversion ratio for Crossfire will continue to climb, probably approaching 20% by the end of this year, while JoyJoy’s conversion ratio is unlikely to break 35% by then.  Assuming both continue to get downloads relative to their chart placement, and the chart placement doesn’t change too much, JoyJoy will have more downloads and sales than Crossfire, but Crossfire will make more money.  But any number of variables could change that, the most worrying being if Crossfire gets pushed off the Top Rated charts in the US.

What Does It All Mean

It’s difficult to make definitive statements about what will or won’t sell on XBLIG.  Crossfire has definitely gotten better early buzz and online presence than JoyJoy did, but the amount of downloads wasn’t as significantly higher as I expected based on that, and long-term JoyJoy will likely have more downloads despite a better start for Crossfire.

Even though the data isn’t conclusive, it does appear that Crossfire had a small positive effect on JoyJoy, and it’s possible they’ll continue to help each other.  I’m less certain the naming convention is helping (“radiangames Crossfire” instead of “Crossfire”), and in fact it could be hurting the games (heard about issues with people finding both games).  If I had it to do over again, I’d likely drop the “radiangames” portion since the box art conveys the connection just as well and in a much more graceful way.  I’ll probably continue to use the convention for XBLIG since it’s already out there and it’s possible it’ll have a positive long-term effect, but for other platforms ”radiangames” will not be in the name.

Moving on to things that are more certain: It’s been said before by other developers, but the most important factor to downloads and sales on XBLIG is visibility on the Xbox 360 Games Marketplace.  There are other factors, with box art being the next most important because it’s the first thing most people will see about your game, but the easier it is to find your game, the more people will download it, and the more sales you’ll get.

Unfortunately, XBLIG developers have little control over visibility. 

Getting onto the Top Rated charts is difficult and continues to become more difficult as more games are released.  Whereas a 4.25 out of 5 user rating was a guaranteed spot in the Top 15 in the US just a few months ago, it’s no longer a guaranteed spot in the Top 20.  And since I’m discussing ratings, I wanted to show one more chart:

I’ve cut off any ranking above 30 to get a better sense of the actual trends.  The data mostly shows that the rating (stars out of 5) generally goes up, while the ranking (within all Indie Games), which is shown above, goes down over time, with the first ratings usually being especially harsh.

It’s important to note that JoyJoy had a rating of 3.5 out of 5 after 17 ratings, and first reached a 4.25 (which it still has today) after 128 ratings, whereas Crossfire had a rating of 4.0 out of 5 after 32 ratings, and a 4.25 by the time it had 40 ratings.  Why Crossfire’s ranking flattened out so much quicker than JoyJoy’s is something of a mystery, though one theory is that JoyJoy experienced some twin-stick shooter backlash initially, and another is that JoyJoy has a deeper set of player-friendly options that have taken longer to discover.  The continued downward trend for JoyJoy also happened to correspond somewhat to being chosen for the IGN Top Picks list.

Returning to the other charts, the Top Download chart is difficult to stay on for long periods of time without being highly-ranked on other charts or featuring Avatars.  Avatar games are featured elsewhere on the dashboard and have an advantage over other Indie Games, and games on the Top Download charts are the most visible, leading to a positive feedback loop for those who get into the top slots (particularly the first 5).  Occasionally other types of games are featured outside of the Indie Games channel (such as during the 30 Days of Undead promotion), but relying on such things is not recommended.

What’s Next?

If someone were to ask me whether I’d recommend they use the same strategy of creating lots of small, high-quality games for XBLIG, I’d have to say no given the data I have so far. 

At the same time, I’ll continue doing just that, at least for a couple more games.  I have the advantage of more experience than a new developer and having 2 highly-rated games on the service (and the name recognition that goes with it), and stopping now without seeing if the whole “radiangames” branding concept works or not seems like a wasted opportunity.

Also, XBLIG is still the only way to get make console games that doesn’t require any concept approval, which is important since most of the games I want to make work better on a console, but won’t all necessarily be appealing to those approving the ideas.

Blaze On Hold

Blaze was going somewhat well, but I wasn’t really enjoying working on it much, and I still have lots of high-level questions about the design after my initial design wasn’t panning out the way I hoped.  It’s also a game whose scope  and art requirements seemed much larger than my other games so far.  I’ll still come back to the idea some time, possibly this year, but for now I’m focusing on other things.

Fluid Likely Headed to XBLIG

After striking out from both the PAX10 and a potential XBLA deal, Fluid is now looking like it’ll head to XBLIG.  It’s possible it could end up somewhere else, but don’t be surprised to be staring at the screen above sometime in August.

Game #5 Started

With Blaze (Game #4) on hold, and Fluid’s future uncertain, I started another game.  It has a more reasonable scope so it can be done quickly, and it’s a type of game no one would publish, but it’s also one that I really wanted to make just because I’ll have fun playing it.  It’s definitely coming to XBLIG, but whether before or after Fluid is still to be determined.

Crossfire Sales Preview

While most of Crossfire’s reviews and hype has been very positive, there hasn’t been a large increase in trial downloads compared to what JoyJoy had at the beginning.  I’ll save the sales stats for next Monday, since I want data from today included for a direct comparison to JoyJoy’s first 9 days.  A quick summary for those who can’t wait: Downloads are higher by 25+% and revenues are higher by 50+%, but the download to sales ratio is lower by 50% (to be expected given the price increase).

Crossfire Reviews

Like I said, “most” of Crossfire’s reviews have been very positive, but Edge’s review (6 out of 10) was not one of them.  Similar concerns about gameplay style were expressed in a different review as well.  It’s definitely possible to play in a way that makes the game less fun by staying at the edge and slowing picking off the enemies, and a few waves (43 and 49 in particular) can be a bit tedious, but after doing another playthrough this week I’m still very comfortable with how the game plays.  If you’re aggressive and efficient in your use of warping and superfire, you’re thoroughly rewarded with much higher scores and lots of success.  That probably means I should have online scoreboards to enhance the importance of score (which is only stored locally right now), but adding that in an update is unlikely right now.

To finish on a happier note, other reviews and Xbox Live Indie Game roundups have mentioned Crossfire in a good way, including Bitmob, Cheap Ass Gamer, Gamers With Casts, XnPlay, Crush Frag Destroy, and XBLA Ratings (10 out of 10).

Reviews:
The Examiner (5/5)

Xbox Hornet (9.5/10)

Game Gavel (9.0/10)

Multiplayer Games

Buzz:
Destructoid

Shack News

VGChartz

DIYGamer

Crave Online

NeoGAF