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360 Live Arcade Sales Stats

C4Lukins

Junior Member
For those interested, please read this part first so you know what you are looking at. Because Microsoft does not release any official numbers, the best way to look at Live Arcade sales is to go to the leaderboards and see the last name on the list and their ranking. Pretty much the only way to do this is to try and get the lowest score on each game so that you do not have to scroll through tens of thousands of people to see the bottom one. So I used my special secret account that nobody uses on my 360, and went to work. It can actually be quite challengeing to suck worse then everyone else, and you only get one shot at it per an account.

Is this accurate? Probably not. It should be pretty close. Some people have multiple accounts on a single 360 which will fudge up the numbers, and some people have bought these games and for one reason or another not posted a score on the leaderboards. This is probably as close as we can get without Microsoft making any sort of announcement.

So I thought it would be interesting to do a monthly chart that shows total sales of each game, monthly sales of each game, and how much money the game has made. Because I do not have every single game, I am going to need some help. The games with a question mark after the sales numbers, are games that I do not own, and had to use my friends leaderboard list to pick the lowest score among them. So those are not accurate. What I need is people who own those games to try and post a low score in them on a seperate account from their main (I used my Japanese one), and then add me to their friends list so I can see the new tally each month. So if you want to help, send me a friends request, and tell me in here exactly what games on the list you posted a low score for.

A few extra notes. I'm not filling in all the extra information until I get more accurate numbers, so this is kind of just a starter chart for now. The Hardwood games are not included because the leaderboards require competitive play, and the numbers would just be to far off. Hexic will not be listed in the top ten games for obvious reasons, but I will list its totals. As far as Hexic is concerned, I tried to get a low score on it, but it looks like there are literally thousands of people with lower scores then me, so if someone wants to challenge themselves to getting under 3750 points, we can get more accurate numbers on it. Remember games with a question mark after them are games I do not own, and need numbers for.

Astropop- 21,321
Bankshot Billiards- 35,136 ???
Bejeweled 2- 50,994 ???
Cloning Clyde- 14,063
Crystal Quest- 29,557
Feeding Frenzy- 50,229
Frogger- 43,416 ???
Gauntlet- 77,394 ???
Geometry Wars- 188,428
Hexic HD- 566,230
Jewel Quest- 18,091 ???
Joust- 45,010
Marble Blast Ultra- 107,886
Mutant Storm Reloaded- 38,726
Outpost Kaloki X- 23,732 ???
Robotron 2084- 22,887
Smash TV- 78,790
Uno- 143,223
Wik Fable of Souls- 15,591
Zuma- 70,264

Some interesting things I discovered while doing this.
Over 20,000 Uno players have not managed to win a single single player game.
Somehow people are managing to get a lower score then 200 on Joust, despite the fact that you get 4 lives, and 50 points each time you die.
The worst finishing time on the first level of Marble Blast Ultra, is over an hour.
Over 40 people purchased Geometry wars between 1am and 2am Central time while I was compiling this list.
Cloning Clyde sold 8500 copies on its first day, and 5410 on its second day.

Games I need info on.
Bankshot Billiards
Bejeweled
Frogger
Gauntlet
Hexic
Jewel Quest
Outpost Kaloki X

Gamertag- C4Lukin
 

terrene

Banned
How the hell is Hexic selling so well?!? It's a damn pack in (for Premium systems, anyway) -- are there that many tard pack owners desperate for that shit?

Bummer about Astropop's sales. It's ugly, and it's a Magical Drop ripoff, but it's a goddamn fun-as-hell game.

The weird thing about it is that you can't blame lack of marketing or anything, since there essentially is none for these games. People just honestly weren't jazzed with the demo, I guess.
 
terrene said:
How the hell is Hexic selling so well?!? It's a damn pack in (for Premium systems, anyway) -- are there that many tard pack owners desperate for that shit?
He's just counting the leaderboards so the free ones are in that count too.
 

Meier

Member
terrene said:
How the hell is Hexic selling so well?!? It's a damn pack in (for Premium systems, anyway) -- are there that many tard pack owners desperate for that shit?

No, it's probably almost exclusively from premium owners who have it for free. Notice the 5 dollar games have sold far and away better than the 10 dollar ones.. well that's because most of the 10 dollar ones need to have their price lowered.

Do it MS, and I'll buy a few of them in a snap.
 

Baker

Banned
The Hexic HD numbers would also be a good stat on how many 360 owners are connected to the internets. If anybody cares about that.
 

Wario64

works for Gamestop (lol)
Eh, I doubt these numbers are accurate at all with the whole multiple gamertags on one X360. Not all X360's are played by 1 person only
 

C4Lukins

Junior Member
perplexcity said:
The Hexic HD numbers would also be a good stat on how many 360 owners are connected to the internets. If anybody cares about that.

It should be pretty close. 20 of the 25 people on my friends list had a score for Hexic.
 
Oddly enough, mygamercard has the number of Hexic players at 384,451. I'm not sure what that's all about.

EDIT: Ok, their numbers are not accurate.

mygamercard.net faq

Why don't I appear on the leaderboard?

When a GC2JPG or GC2SWF version of your GamerCard is viewed, your statistics are updated on the leaderboard. If you are not on the leaderboard at all, this is because you have not yet used our advanced GamerCard features. To get started, it's simple and free. All you have to do is place an enhanced version of your GamerCard on a website or on your desktop so that your statistics will be included in the leaderboard. Instructions on creating an enhanced GamerCard are on our homepage.
 

Meier

Member
Hitler Stole My Potato said:
This one really should be a lot higher, imo. Outpost Kaloki is one of the best XBLA games out there.

5 bucks and it gets another purchase. Not until then.
 

Vark

Member
Do silver members have access to online leaderboards? cause if they don't the numbers would be a lot higher.
 

C4Lukins

Junior Member
Vark said:
Do silver members have access to online leaderboards? cause if they don't the numbers would be a lot higher.


Yes they do. I used my extra silver account to post these scores.
 

Nemesis_

Member
Very interesting figures, but as many have said the accuracy of the data is something I'm a tad skeptical about.

Funny thing about the UNO though ^_^
 

Tieno

Member
GhaleonEB said:
Like you said, these won't be perfect. MS said Uno outsold GeoWars, for example.
I don't think they said that. Uno has a higher(highest) conversion rate (download trial/buy game), somewhere around 50-60%. Maybe more people downloaded Geo Wars.
 

terrene

Banned
Tieno said:
I don't think they said that. Uno has a higher(highest) conversion rate (download trial/buy game), somewhere around 50-60%. Maybe more people downloaded Geo Wars.
Uno is probably a tricky one to gauge this way, right? There are like 5 different leaderboards, after all.

It surprised me how well-put-together it was, and I ended up buying it, too. It really is a great version of the card game, with everything (especially the chilled-out, fun online play) pretty much done perfectly. I'm all for its success.
 

Meier

Member
Barnolde said:
I'm this way for most games. I want Bejeweled 2, just not for $10.

My girlfriend loves Bejeweled, so I sprung for it even at 10 bucks -- she likes Zuma too, but I've held off on getting it for her. But other than that, I've just got Uno, Geometry Wars and Hexic.
 

Jesiatha

Member
I won't comment on sales, but my wife's account has the lowest Hexic HD score in the world (so we can check the leaderboard totals). I don't have exact numbers handy, but I think it is just over 500,000.

Having to do this is part of the reason we put the "total players" count in UNO :).
 

C4Lukins

Junior Member
terrene said:
Uno is probably a tricky one to gauge this way, right? There are like 5 different leaderboards, after all.

It surprised me how well-put-together it was, and I ended up buying it, too. It really is a great version of the card game, with everything (especially the chilled-out, fun online play) pretty much done perfectly. I'm all for its success.

Certain games are trickier then others. With UNO I used the single player leaderboard, assuming that just about everyone who has the game has played it at least once in that mode. Uno actually tells you the total amount of players at the bottom of the leaderboard.
 

C4Lukins

Junior Member
Jesiatha said:
I won't comment on sales, but my wife's account has the lowest Hexic HD score in the world (so we can check the leaderboard totals). I don't have exact numbers handy, but I think it is just over 500,000.

Having to do this is part of the reason we put the "total players" count in UNO :).


That is awesome. You actually have to try to not get combos which can be pretty difficult. It takes a lot of skill to be the worst at that game.
 

Meier

Member
Jesiatha said:
I won't comment on sales, but my wife's account has the lowest Hexic HD score in the world (so we can check the leaderboard totals).

I always kind of figured you were a female due to your user name. I guess I think of Jessica or something.

Make them lower the prices.
 
Interesting. Here it is in order from largest sales to smallest:

540,795 Hexic HD
188,428 Geometry Wars
143,223 Uno
107,886 Marble Blast Ultra
78,790 Smash TV
77,394 Gauntlet
70,264 Zuma
50994 Bejeweled 2
50,229 Feeding Frenzy
45,010 Joust
43,416 Frogger
38,726 Mutant Storm Reloader
35,136 Bankshot Billiards
29557 Crystal Quest
23,732 Outpost Kaloki X
22,887 Robotron 2084
21,321 Astropop
18,091 Jewel Quest
14,063 Cloning Clyde
 

C4Lukins

Junior Member
heavy liquid said:
Interesting. Here it is in order from largest sales to smallest:

540,795 Hexic HD
188,428 Geometry Wars
143,223 Uno
107,886 Marble Blast Ultra
78,790 Smash TV
77,394 Gauntlet
70,264 Zuma
50994 Bejeweled 2
50,229 Feeding Frenzy
45,010 Joust
43,416 Frogger
38,726 Mutant Storm Reloader
35,136 Bankshot Billiards
29557 Crystal Quest
23,732 Outpost Kaloki X
22,887 Robotron 2084
21,321 Astropop
18,091 Jewel Quest
14,063 Cloning Clyde


Thanks. That will save some time when I get the complete numbers in.
 

LakeEarth

Member
EDITED to add the misplaced Wik numbers.

Lets play with these numbers:

Highest Selling 800 Point Game - Marble Blast Ultra
Lowest Selling 400 Point Game - Robotron (though Hearts/Spades might be under that)
Worst Selling 'good' game - Outpost Kaloki X and I guess Wik (I wasn't a fan)
Best Selling crap game - Gauntlet (the game itself is fine but no continues while playing online, the ****!?) and Feeding Frenzy (way too easy, achievements are mostly exercises in pointless repetitive crap)

Averages (for fairness I removed Cloning Clyde since its only been out for 3 days)
Average sales for 400 point games - 78588.125
Average sales for 800 point games - 44137.111

So by those numbers maybe charging 800 points isn't such a bad idea afterall, business wise. I was hoping that the 400 point numbers would be > 800 point numbers x 2. 400 point games are my kryptonite, impulse buy! For one week Frogger sold really well.

IMO it seems that gamers know quality. The better games are floating to the top, but they have to be easily approachable and have a good demo. At least that's what I see.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
Tieno said:
I don't think they said that. Uno has a higher(highest) conversion rate (download trial/buy game), somewhere around 50-60%. Maybe more people downloaded Geo Wars.
Greg Canessa said:
The one thing we didn't know was the success Arcade would have in general. Uno was a title that a lot of people didn't think would be very big. There was a lot of debate internally about that. Some of us thought it would either be the biggest thing since sliced bread or it was going to be yawn, who cares. Uno is our fastest selling Arcade game in history and it has actually, last week, passed Geometry Wars as our best-selling title.
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/20/joystiq-interviews-greg-canessa-of-xbla
 

Mojovonio

Banned
well, i'm glad MS isn't letting go of aracde and letting it become an afterthought. I think they're doing exaclty what they wanted to do with aracde, attract non-gamers. Cause honestly, why would any of us hardcore gamers buy bejewled?

Ok, maybe we would, but these sales are phenomenal.
 

LakeEarth

Member
Mojovonio said:
well, i'm glad MS isn't letting go of aracde and letting it become an afterthought. I think they're doing exaclty what they wanted to do with aracde, attract non-gamers. Cause honestly, why would any of us hardcore gamers buy bejewled?

Ok, maybe we would, but these sales are phenomenal.
I think the demand for casual, simpler games is going up. Not just gamers but the gaming industry, which won't survive continuously pumping out games that cost millions to make and end up selling less than 50000 copies. Remember when long epic games were the exception?
 

Mojovonio

Banned
LakeEarth said:
I think the demand for casual, simpler games is going up. Not just gamers but the gaming industry, which won't survive continuously pumping out games that cost millions to make and end up selling less than 50000 copies. Remember when long epic games were the exception?

That's a great point too.

I also think that the main people that own a 360 are the ones that owned the first xbox/ps2s. Most of these people have grown up in the years, gotten jobs, married, kids, and just don't have time to invest in a game. You can't pick oblivion up and play for 5 minutes like you can with Cloning Clyde.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
Mojovonio said:
That's a great point too.

I also think that the main people that own a 360 are the ones that owned the first xbox/ps2s. Most of these people have grown up in the years, gotten jobs, married, kids, and just don't have time to invest in a game. You can't pick oblivion up and play for 5 minutes like you can with Cloning Clyde.
Also - I bought Cloning Clyde and Smash TV because my daughter loves them. I play Oblivion. It's a great way to expand the use of the console in the home to a broader market. My wife is addicted to Hexic.
 

sangreal

Member
Here is what NinjaBee (Cloning Clyde/OKX) had to say about this method:

Estimating Live Arcade Sales from Leaderboards
I've noticed a few people making a direct correlation between the number of entries in the main leadboard of an Xbox Live Arcade game and the number of actual sales of that game.

Without revealing any specific top-secret numbers, I think I can say that my experience shows this to be a fairly accurate measure of sales. So far. However, there are some reasons why this could be less than totally accurate. I'm going to jot down some thoughts I've had on the subject.

1. You have to own the game to have an entry on the leaderboards.

This is the primary reason people consider this a valid estimate. You can't have a place on the leaderboards unless you have an official unlocked version of the game.

2. Multiple people on the purchaser's console can play the game and post to leaderboards.

This is a cool feature of Live Arcade - if you download and purchase the game, your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/kids/mom can play the game, too, and potentially post to leaderboards. This skews the leaderboard-to-purchase ratio way up, potentially, since you could in theory have a dozen or more players in the leaderboards from a single sale. In practice, this may not be that big a deal.

3. People with free full copies of the game can post to leaderboards.

This includes free press downloads, complimentary copies the publisher arranges to hand out, and other free cases. For instance, we arranged for a number of free copies of OKX for reviewers on serious game sites. I have no idea how high this number is for most XBLA games, but it seems like it will be fairly high. At least a few hundred, I would guess. How many people with this kind of access to the game will post to leaderboards? I don't know, but it skews the leaderboard/purchase ratio higher again.

4. Not everybody posts to leaderboards.

You might buy the game and never play it while online. People in your house may have access to the game, but may not have Live accounts and therefore not be able to post to the leaderboards. You may simply play non-default modes in the game and end up posting to some leaderboards, but not to the "main" leaderboard. This brings the leaderboard/purchase ratio back down a bit.

The Results

You'd think these things would conspire to make the leaderboard entry count a too-high indicator of sales, right? It didn't seem to for us, but we don't have a ton of data to work with, since the service hasn't been out that long. Maybe the first quarter of sales is a bad example, and we'll find out this quarter how far off it really is!

This technique for estimating sales also completely ignores additional downloadable/purchasable content, such as levels and gamer pictures. Of course, if a downloadable level has its own leaderboards, you can make new estimates based on that.

How to see the bottom of leaderboards

I don't know if any game has a feature to jump to the bottom of a leaderboard. I mostly doubt it. The way some interested parties arrange it is to score very low on the leaderboard, to be fairly sure they're at the bottom, and then look at their ranking to find a number of entries on the leaderboard. My theory is that eventually so many people will be doing this that the main leaderboard of any game will have a pile of players contending for the bottom spot... :)

http://www.ninjabee.com/blog/
 

Morgon

Member
Speaking specifically regarding MyGamerCard.net --

Since Microsoft registers demos as having the game, there are leaderboard entries for those people. This does 'inflate' the numbers in that regard.

As mentioned, we don't always have every single person, because as NinjaBee stated, many people play offline, and they probably don't visit forums or 'hang out' online, therefore not being picked up by us.

I really wish there were a way to separate demos from actual retail games, as it would make it a better resource for threads like these, and would serve our userbase a bit better as well.
You could probably get a decent 'conversion ratio' result from it, however, simply by looking at those with more than 0 score.
 

bill0527

Member
I haven't read through the whole thread, so someone has probably already pointed this out, but...

Grats on putting the list together first off. There are some things that you have to take into account that can skew these numbers heavily. Multiple profiles on the same Xbox can play on one version of the game so this could greatly inflate those numbers. Microsoft also said this week that Uno and Geometry Wars were vitually neck and neck for the top spot of most game sold, and in your list, they aren't even anywhere close. That should be some indication that the list is nowhere near being accurate.
 

thorns

Banned
I made a thread about this a while ago too, but since I haven't bought many games, it didn't have that much data.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=85292&highlight=sales

quite impressive how games have sold since then.

I think services like XBLA are set to explode. Look at those MBU sales numbers. They're incredible, I think.

Reminds me of this blog by the creators of MBU, in which describe why creating MBU for XBLA was hugely important for them:
http://makeitbigingames.com/blog/?p=7
http://makeitbigingames.com/blog/?p=13

Already in February, he was saying MBU was selling faster than any gane he was worked on in his career.

Here's another entry by him where he describes how XBLA is going to get very competitive and big publishers are already jumping in.
http://makeitbigingames.com/blog/?p=15
 

goldenpp72

Member
I think it's worthy to note that leaderboards only give part of the picture, the fact is I have 2 accounts on my 360 and only one of them has an xbox 360 attached to it, the other is my friend who plays some of these games on occassion.

Now he will own a 360 one of these days and probably these games so it evens out, but still, the leaderboards factor GAMERTAGS that have played the full version.
 

C4Lukins

Junior Member
bill0527 said:
I haven't read through the whole thread, so someone has probably already pointed this out, but...

Grats on putting the list together first off. There are some things that you have to take into account that can skew these numbers heavily. Multiple profiles on the same Xbox can play on one version of the game so this could greatly inflate those numbers. Microsoft also said this week that Uno and Geometry Wars were vitually neck and neck for the top spot of most game sold, and in your list, they aren't even anywhere close. That should be some indication that the list is nowhere near being accurate.

I don't think you can actually post leaderboard scores with extra profiles, you actually have to create another account. Me for instance, I have 5 profiles, 3 of which my friends use. With three of those profiles, they cannot post their high scores on leaderboards because they cannot connect to Live with them. I have two accounts though, my main and my Japanese. I use the Japanese one to get the low scores. Of course that is still going to skew the numbers, but not as many people are going to go through the effort of creating new accounts for their buddies, when they can just make a new profile for them.

In trying to figuire out the difference between UNO and Geometry Wars as far as sales, I think multiple accounts makes a lot of sense. UNO is not the type of game that you would want to open a seperate account for, because it isn't about high scores as much. Geometry Wars on the other hand, is a game where I can see 4 people in the same house opening 4 accounts so that they can compete with each others high score. So I think Geometry Wars sales are probably inflated more then your average title.
 
C4Lukins said:
A few extra notes. I'm not filling in all the extra information until I get more accurate numbers, so this is kind of just a starter chart for now. The Hardwood games are not included because the leaderboards require competitive play, and the numbers would just be to far off. Hexic will not be listed in the top ten games for obvious reasons, but I will list its totals. As far as Hexic is concerned, I tried to get a low score on it, but it looks like there are literally thousands of people with lower scores then me, so if someone wants to challenge themselves to getting under 3750 points, we can get more accurate numbers on it. Remember games with a question mark after them are games I do not own, and need numbers for.

Out of the ones you need numbers for (the ones with the question marks), I own Bankshot Billiards, Bejeweled 2, Frogger, and Gauntlet. I'll try to get some numbers for you, but I might not be able to until tomorrow. That is, if no one else beats me to it first.

That just leaves Jewel Quest and Outpost Kaloki X (and Hexic, if someone can get a more accurate read).
 
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