Nitpick time:
Space Giraffe sucks for XBLA, it’s not what people want to play even for $5. Just going to have to agree to disagree on whether this is the worst game ever

Marathon blew it big time. They wasted money updating the graphics when they should’ve spent more time making the experience more playable. We put a big investment making the Duke 3D rewind system so people would have a reason to spend $10 on a game that they could warez on pc for free.

Dude, Break Steady is match-3 garbage. Played it on partnernet several months before release, someone along the line should’ve said it’s not fun and not what gamers want to buy. Would’ve saved the dev and MS a lot of money.

Don’t know what to say about Poker Smash other than the market for poker on XBLA might be saturated by the free Hold’em Game. The game UI is slick as all hell, but I think they invested their time poorly on all that and not enough on why someone would want to play the game.

Did you get an XBLA deal? If you want some TCR tips or ballpark figures for using VMC, MS loc, etc, let me know in email.

Anyway, my point was not that great games cannot be done for less than $180k of an investment. My point was that to actually establish an indie game company and pay people salaries (rather than the true garage dev experience), it might be difficult to achieve the required number of sales. Let’s take The Maw as an example. The Maw’s team tried to create a pretty sizeable game and it looks quite good. In the postmortem, it said they had 7 full time and 2 part time for 9 months. Let’s say it averaged to 8 people a month including the part timers. Twister Pixel isn’t a garage developer, so they have office space and presumably are paying salaries. The ballpark fully loaded for an employee is $10k a month. That includes medical insurance (which I’m finding is really expensive), office space, utilities, etc. That means their game probably cost them $720k. Assuming they got a 35% royalty rate (which I think plenty of developers will take because there isn’t much of an alternative for indies), they would have to sell 205k to break even. Will they reach that? I don’t know. Hopefully they will, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t.

Obviously since we are self funding Retro/Grade, we are living on quite conservative budgets. Sustained though, no one wants to live like they are poor, and it’s very difficult for us to entice others to work for free, so for someone who wants to actually start a real company doing downloadable indie style titles, it’s a tricky thing. Also, I strongly doubt that we will make $180k in the first week, but I hope you’re correct!

Everything on XBLA with less than 100K sales is pretty bad. Maybe one or two have the wrong price point like Penny Arcade, but the majority are just horrible games and totally wrong for the XBLA audience.

You can make XBLA games for $175K, just move out of California and live like you’re poor. My current yearly expenses are under $30K and I’ve got tons of wiggle room to get tighter (If I shared an apartment with the rest of the dev team, got rid of the sports car, etc.) With a designer, a programmer and an artist, you could put together a 10 hour game experience right for the XBLA audience in two years for around $180K. You would recoup the first week.

Everything on XBLA with