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Xbox Live Arcade SalesGAF April 2013 Thread of Battleblocks, Madness and Monaco

R

Rlan

Member
Welcome to the new Xbox Live Arcade Sales Analysis Thread for NeoGAF! I began this two months ago, and last month and will continue on this month! Woop!

March's Leaderboard data consisted of:

march2013-4.png


Interesting takeaways:

- Terraria shoots up the charts! One of the first to beat Minecraft's weekly sales in a long, long time. Added 127,944 players in its first week.- No idea on PSN sales for the game. If you purchased that version, let me know!

- Pretty much everything else we could follow this month failed - WRC Powerslide, Giana Sisters, and Dollar Dash. I'd wager Darkstalkers did pretty well, but we've no way to check.

- Couldn't follow Alien Spidy at all because the demo doesn't allow you to check. I'd wager it didn't sell very well.

- Got the Minecraft stat directly from Mojang themselves! Over 250,000 new players this month, pushing the game over 6,000,000 purchases! Madness!

And now onto the first week of April, 2013's sales analysis.

xbla-april-2013-1.png


Interesting notes:

- Battleblock Theater's opening week clocked at 60,566 players, though sales would be a bit less thanks to the main cooperative component of the game.

- To compare, this is not exactly Castle Crashers huge. Some comparison would be Lara Croft TOL (44,733 first week) or Scott Pilgrim (71,560 first week)

- No idea how well Double Dragon II did. It's only got leaderboards for those who finish the game, It's gotten horrible review scores though.

- Lots of stuff on sale this week, including Trials HD and Evo, as well as the original Castle Crashers. All games seemed to get a nice boost from it.


Next week we'll see the release of Motocross Madness.
 
C

CrunchinJelly

formerly cjelly
BattleBlock Theatre did better than I expected.

Not bad considering there were some big sales on XBLA games that week and Terraria just came out the week before.
 
J

jlh

Member
I'm really happy to see some good numbers for XBLA two weeks in a row. Terraria is looking great so far and I expected BattleBlock to do well with the combination of good reviews and The Behemoth's fanbase.

The sale really helped some of the older games and hopefully the April Punchcard rewards promotion will give more people an incentive to buy more of the new releases coming out this month.

Thanks again Rlan for all the work you put into this, it's actually a lot more fun looking at your XBLA threads than following the retail sales threads on GAF.
 
T

toythatkills

Member
Good games with large fanbases sell lots. Shit games and overpriced games with no fanbase or advertising whatsoever which have been out on Steam for months sell barely any copies.

Nothing much surprising this time round.
 
G

Grisby

Member
I don't have much to contribute other than to say I'm glad your still able to do this.

Giana Sisters is the kick starter one right? Didn't even know that was out.
 
G

Gowans

Member
Battleblock is a really difficult one to explain but it's one of those rare games the Mrs will play.

Wonder if the Micecraft XBLA crew have went for Terreria due to wanting a change, it's no where near as accessible as Minecraft tho, wonder how it did on PSN who haven't got the guys already playing Minecraft.
 
S

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
chubigans said:
I'm also willing to bet it won't have the legs of Castle Crashers either. Not even close.
Click to expand...

Even if it did have comparable ongoing interest, the effective lifespan of the console will be shorter so the effect of the interest will be less (I guess what I mean is that selling 5-10,000 a week over a period of 5 years is better than selling 5-10,000 a week over a period of 18 months)
 
S

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
chubigans said:
I'm also willing to bet it won't have the legs of Castle Crashers either. Not even close.
Click to expand...
I don't see how it could, unless XBLA on the 360 continues to do well after the next Xbox is released. CC is almost 5 years old. The Behemoth probably could have retired after that.
 
Jonsoncao

Jonsoncao

Banned
I wonder how many people are on the Steam/PSN Castle Crashers leaderboards. As humongous as the XBLA release?
 
A

airborn

Member
CrunchinJelly said:
Motocross Madness seems to be doing well. Just under 30,000 on the leaderboards already.
Click to expand...
Those numbers aren't representative, given that everyone who plays the trial version also gets recorded on the leaderboard.

You need to look at the second (locked) track to get an idea of how the game is doing.
 
R

Rlan

Member
Wait, is that the case? That a fail generally on QA. I've only ever seen it happen to PSN games personally.

Either way, this is the last week:

xbla-april-2013-2.png


- Motocross Madness seemed to do well, but maybe not?
- Battleblock Theater nears 100,000 players.
- Terraria still doing pretty good.
 
ULTROS!

ULTROS!

People seem to like me because I am polite and I am rarely late. I like to eat ice cream and I really enjoy a nice pair of slacks.
Hmmm... I thought Giana Sisters TD was a good game. How come it got 72?
 
N

Noogy

Member
overcast said:
I don't know how XBLA works, but are those good numbers? Finally bought it when it went on sale.
Click to expand...

It's all relative, really. Depending on the budget and team size, you could say either 20k or 2 million is a success. 100k is a very nice milestone this late in the console cycle. Obviously not Minecraft numbers, but what is.
 
R

Rlan

Member
Top 20 for the week:

1. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
2. Terraria – Xbox 360 Edition
3. BattleBlock Theater
4. Motocross Madness
5. Counter-Strike: GO
6. Trials Evolution
7. Castle Crashers
8. Pinball FX2
9. Battlefield 1943
10. Trials HD
11. REAL STEEL
12. The Walking Dead
13. Dungeon Defenders
14. Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection
15. Marvel vs. Capcom: Origins
16. Mark of the Ninja
17. Full House Poker
18. Twisted Pixel Games Bundle
19. Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Decade Duels Plus
20. Magic 2013

So basically the Motocross Madness numbers were screwed up. I'll go based on the second level next time around.
 
R

Rlan

Member
Sorry I didn't update last week, I was a little distracted with other stuff. I did have the stats though!

xbla-april-2013-4.png


- Poker Night 2, according to C4Lukins, has about 24,000 players on the leaderboards.
- God Mode from last week has 16,790 players on it.
- Motocross Madness's data is based on the second level, which isn't available in the demo. The demo somehow added players regardless of trial or full. It's probably higher than the numbers I give, but not by much.
-New release Battleblock Theater has 143,000 players now! It's not been a Castle Crashers uber success, but it's doing great otherwise.
- Terraria now almost at 300K
- No Minecraft stats this month yet, as the data app they use was down, apparently.
- Sacred Citadel doesn't seem to have done well on XBLA, a shame as it's from the ilomilo people.
- Lots of sales on the first week, with Trials games getting a big push, and Dust cracking 100,000 players.
 
D

Dark Octave

Banned
I don't understand, are the same people just buying Castle Crashers over and over again for the last six years? I mean, it's been #1 without a break forever. Shouldn't everyone who owns an Xbox 360 have the game by now?
 
P

pswii60

Member
Dark Octave said:
I don't understand, are the same people just buying Castle Crashers over and over again for the last six years? I mean, it's been #1 without a break forever. Shouldn't everyone who owns an Xbox 360 have the game by now?
Click to expand...

It is strange how that game continues to outsell new releases each and every week. And also Battleblock Theatre doing great out of the gate too.

Doesn't seem to be much middle-ground on XBLA, either you have a massive hit or a massive failure.
 
S

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
pswii60 said:
It is strange how that game continues to outsell new releases each and every week. And also Battleblock Theatre doing great out of the gate too.

Doesn't seem to be much middle-ground on XBLA, either you have a massive hit or a massive failure.
Click to expand...
There's a lot of middle ground. If you consider the relatively low budgets, I think a great number of XBLA games at least break even in the long term. A few hundred thousand sales is still millions of dollars of revenue. There used to be charts that showed the LTD for nearly every game on the service but I imagine that the list is too long for that now.
 
R

Rlan

Member
Top Arcade Titles (Full Versions purchased) for this week

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
Poker Night 2
Terraria – Xbox 360 Edition
BattleBlock Theater
From Dust
God Mode
Plants vs. Zombies
Trials Evolution
Castle Crashers
Peggle
Catan
Quantum Conundrum
Fruit Ninja Kinect
The Walking Dead
Motocross Madness
I Am Alive
Pinball FX2
Trials HD
Puzzle Fighter HD
Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Decade Duels Plus

And yeah, God mode's Friday release means it didn't have as many days in the first week.
 
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