Why Don’t XNA Community Games Sell?

With indie games being such a big deal recently, the subject of sales and success were bound to come up at GDC. What I’ve heard doesn’t sound to good though, as numerous reports from the show seem to indicate that while any random piece of software developed for the iPhone may generate substantial revenue, the same can not be said for self distribution over the web or, sadly, the NXE’s XNA Community Games channel.

This has been on my mind recently, since you may or may not know that I am also making a game for XNA Community Games. Rather than try to come up with another outlet for me to get my game out there, I’m more interested in figuring out why XNA games aren’t doing so well, and what I can do to get around that.

Quality of games aside, I think the biggest hurdle for XNA games to get over is promotion. From GameIndustry.biz, via Joystiq:

Speaking at GDC, Sony development relations manager Chris Eden warned self-publishers of downloadable titles about the perils of poor marketing, saying promotion-shy developers often send their brainchildren "out to die lonely and unloved."

Looking around on the web, there really is no substantial coverage for good XNA titles, much less the mediocre ones. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be promoting the Community Games channel. Even developer self promotion seems to be pretty lacking.

So it looks like we have games no one knows about, sitting on a shelf only some people are aware of, but these people are price conscious consumers, and since they can’t find out about the games on the shelf, how worthwhile they are and such, they don’t buy them.

This has got to change.

Any XNA developers out there want to cross promote?