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?

The book, Aaron Reed’s Learning XNA 3.0, has been really helpful. It’s shown me the basics of user input polling, collision detection, and movement. I’ve never used C# before, but another thing I’ve discovered is that I have a pretty good sense for programming that seems to carry over to XNA, even though I don’t know the language. Plus, the XNA libraries are so convenient to have. I finally feel like I’m programming in a real world setting where I don’t need to write all of these low-level functions and such because there are people who have done it for me, and I can just use them.

At first, I was pretty skeptical of my ability to really get anything running with the XNA tools. After all, I haven’t programmed since college, didn’t ever end up getting that CS degree, and the first time I tried to install Game Studio Express didn’t turn out so well. (Yeah, I couldn’t figure out how to run it. It was sad.) This time, I’ve actually gotten into the program and gotten things on the screen to move around with the gamepad, keyboard, or mouse, animated sprites, and it all only took me a few hours.  I even added rumble support. The last couple of days have been pretty exciting.

So, what happens now? Well, the plan is to get a simple game out as quickly as possible, just something for me to play, so I have something to show for all of my studying, and I don’t get discouraged by the process. After that, maybe a larger project. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be seeing it on Xbox Live. I’ll keep you all posted.

And now, Videos That Made Me Laugh: