develop-online
Also some sales data from XBLA
Develop 2010: Attendees bemused by reasons why the popular PSN title fell at early hurdles
Hello Games took to the stage at the Develop Conference today to exact revenge on the publishers that turned down the Joe Danger project.
Sean Murray, a programmer at the studio, revealed that Joe Danger sold 50,000 copies in its first week on the PlayStation Network. Yet Hello Games struggled to convince publishers that the title would work.
Without naming any names, Murray went through a list of reasons why the game was turned down, quoting what he had heard from various publishers in meetings. Attendees at the Develop session broke into laughter.
The list, as quoted by Murray, can be found below:
Name me one popular game with motorbikes?
Collecting giant coins feels unrealistic to me
I can see this working as a Facebook app
We want games that are less about fun right now
We love the theme, but with a different game
We believe the iPhone will be largely unsupported
Can Joe be a monkey? We like Monkeys
Also some sales data from XBLA
Sean Murray, a programmer at Hello Games, said during his lecture that 31 per cent of XBLA titles are what he deems as casual yet, he said, such games account for less than five per cent of the total market.
Murray, speaking at a lecture entitled Five Big Things Publishers Dont Understand About Small Games, had little praise for casual games which have spread across digital networks.
Theyre cheap to make, theyre easier to make... nobody is buying them really, he said.
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Murray described the contrast between XBLA store presence and sales as The Uno Effect explaining that the digital version of the classic card game was the first title to sell over a million copies on XBLA.
He suggested that the sheer popularity of Uno had encouraged publishers to throw more classic casual games, such as Sudoku titles, into the digital market. Yet he claimed, the popularity of Uno was a red-herring.
The reason for the Uno effect, he said, was that it was given away for free with the Xbox 360 Arcade [SKU], and then grew via word-of-mouth.
Other data he presented seemed to suggest that 47 per cent of XBLA games dont sell beyond 25,000 copies, while 17 per cent sell over 200,000.