The Financials of Xbox Live

Via GameSetWatch, a post exploring the cost and payoff from an Xbox Live game. From the article: "Let's say you are a publisher or a developer that is able to fund your own development, so, a $10 game (800 Gamer Points) would net you $6.50, or 120,000 units * $6.50 per unit = $780,000. Again, if you are a starving Indie developer this sounds like an infinite amount of money. But, in the world of publishers, this is not considered a big hit."

To be pointlessly anal...

[Blakey Rat]

This article refers to a Xbox Live Arcade game. Not a regular game that happens to support Xbox Live.

Re:Nice new first rung on the ladder for a develop

[Tim Browse]

To go from:

Next you can do maybe a budget title with a respectable publisher.

to:

Do a good job, you have self-generated the capital to do the blockbuster.

indicates you have much to learn about the games industry, and in particular, how publishers treat developers that are not already cash rich.

Re:Arcade broadens Xbox 360 development options

[trdrstv]

I think Microsoft should allow games that are as large as 512 MB.

The reason MS put a cap at 50 MB per live game is they sell a 64 meg memory card. They want all users to be able to buy at least 1 game, and have room for save files. It also doens't hurt that with a 50 meg cap you can buy/store a crap load on the 20 gig Hard drive.