(Note that ratings are from XboxIndies.com, which aggregates the ratings from Xbox.com’s different regions.)

There ya go – higher ratings = lower sales!  For every 0.2 stars your game gets, expect to lose 1000 sales!  At around a rating of 3.8, Microsoft will probably start taking money from you and giving it to your customers.  Yay math!  Seriously though, in terms of sales, ratings have little influence.  Below I’ll talk about the individual products (in order of their release) and what impacted their sales (at least according to the info I got from talking to customers)

Barf and Beer (2.79): It was the first drinking game on Xbox, and pretty crass.  The mediocre rating didn’t matter of course.  It was both loved and hated,  and spent several weeks at the #1 downloaded spot. Back in the day (2009) you didn’t get rich for that, but because it cost $2.50 (400 MSP) at the time (the lowest price point available), B&B has brought in the most money of any product I’ve released.  Frankly though, I don’t think it would pass in today’s caustic peer review environment, (one person actually failed it for being too gross, but you can get away with just a single failure).

Avatar Boogie (2.41): Highest quantity of sales and the lowest rating.  It was one of the first avatar products; for months, Microsoft had somehow managed to avoid releasing any decent avatar games after avatars came out, so people were starving for avatar-related content. Avatar Boogie didn’t allow players to use their own avatars though, which contributed to the low ratings (sadly, the feature was banned in review on a technicality).

In Avatar Boogie 2 (3.45), I worked around the no-player-avatar limitation and added a ton of music and dances.  People rated it way higher than the first version (and the highest of any of my products), but it didn’t mean they bought it. Was that because Avatar Boogie-ing wasn’t novel anymore?  Because there were more avatar products out?  Box art didn’t draw people in?  Probably a mixture.

Console Info (2.82):  It sold okay for what it was.  Its main selling point is that it measures the speed it can access your hard disk or USB stick, which makes it a very niche app.

Avatar Planking (2.81) created a firestorm of anger and indignation on the internet, especially among the type of people who just sit around and find things to become outraged at.  But that, and probably the ridiculous boxart and screenshots compelled a ton of people to download it, and I think the people who played appreciated the humor, even as they shook their heads.  It is on-track to pass Avatar Boogie and become my #1 game in terms of overall sales.

So basically, ratings don’t matter unless they’re really, really high.  An average rating doesn’t mean your stuff can’t be awesome.  The Wayans Brothers have already proven this in the movie industry.  I also recommend reading this awesome article written by DigitalDNA games, one of the more successful devs on the service.  It breaks down reasons why games succeed or don’t, and my findings are consistent with it.

Now here are the actual numbers for you to enjoy/revile.  May your ratings be either super-high or super-irrelevant!

Well that was easy! Face Slapper passed review and ended up on the marketplace in a week. No ridiculous arguments with Xbox Live Indie Game (XBLIG) peer reviewers about how your game doesn’t conform to some stereotypical genre that “the community” approves of. Prison rape is to Xbox Indie Game peer review as a gentle massage is to Windows Phone review. Of course the downside is it might not make any money because it’s on Windows Phone. Hope springs eternal though. [Cringes at terrible expression].

Update: The spring has run dry.

Check out Face Slapper

For those of you who were expecting a bitchfest, don’t go yet! I had to cut background music for the initial version due to a deadline I needed to meet, which saddens me deeply. If Microsoft had done their job certifying that audio capabilities of all phones were to spec as they promised consumers and developers they would be, then I wouldn’t have needed to rewrite my audio code (which worked perfectly fine on Xbox and Windows). But that’s for another blog post.  Fortunately, I’m about to submit an update that adds music as well as some gameplay enhancements, and makes Face Slapper all it was meant to be.

[Update: Game now has music and high scores, and is all it was meant to be!]

The most difficult decision on this product was whether the main box cover feature should be an avatar planking on my ugly, ugly foot, or on the back of a cute mule.  My friends voted for the mule, but the foot really ties the art together!   I’m trying to see the box cover through the eyes of someone who doesn’t look at my feet every day.  Oh who am I kidding, I never pay attention to my feet, that’s why they’re so ugly.  But enough about me.

A buddy, after frequently bearing witness to the fact I can’t dance , amusingly asked if Avatar Boogie’s dances were motion-captured from my own body.  If I had those dance capabilities, I would be battling evil breakdance gangs or hanging out with emaciated girls at the ballet studio instead of trying to stay awake long enough to finish this post.  Likewise, I wish I could take credit for Avatar Boogie’s awesome music, but I don’t quite have enough musical talent to crank out sixteen high-quality songs in different genres.

The 30 seconds of music in Barf and Beer took a few days to create, but even subtracting the time it took me to figure out the horrible, horrible CuBase software that Satan conjured into the box of my new MIDI keyboard, I decided that the street cred of actually being able to ship a game outweighs the street cred of writing your own music.  Although on the street cred scale, they’re both rated “mad street cred”.  As they say on the streets.  Enter royalty-free music sites!

Music Sites

I usually visit Shockwave Sound first.  They let you download a preview MP3 file for free, which is infinitely useful for testing.  The file has a sexy-but-unobtrusive female voice saying “Preview” over the top of it, precluding shenanigans.   The owner, Bjorn Lynne, is extremely helpful and responsive.  Because Bjorn was the main point of contact for the artists used in Avatar Boogie 1, I was able to get permission to name the dances after their respective songs, simplifying the UI.

If I can’t find what I want on Shockwave Sound, I visit MusicLoops (Updated: Now RoyaltyFreeMusicClips) for individual tracks.  If you’re looking for a collection of a specific music style, MusicLoops’ affiliate, PartnersInRhyme, sells these collections, which are a better deal than buying the tracks individually.  Conversely, if you are browsing collections on PartnersInRhyme and see a single track you want, you’ll probably find it for sale by its lonely self on MusicLoops.

Finally, I see a lot of Indie Games using music from Incompetech.   Unlike the above sites, much of their music is free!  And their name is funny.  Keep in mind though, that free music is more likely to show up in someone else’s crappy game and taint the awesomeness of your game.

[Update: March 2012 – I have used Kevin MacLeod’s music from Incompetech in Avatar Planking and plan to use it in Face Slapper.  Some of it is really good – you may not find a huge collection but I’ve had good luck finding quality, upbeat music in the piano and polka departments!]

It seems a bunch of other royalty-free music sites have popped up too, and I’m interested in hearing feedback on them.  The bottom line is there is tons of great music out there!

Licensing Terms

Royalty-Free doesn’t mean “free”, it means you pay money up front and can sell as many copies as you want of a product containing the music without paying any more “royalties”.   This is usually better than the model where you may be paying some company a check for $0.05 when you’re 70 years old because five more copies of your game sold that quarter.

That said, sometimes it’s not just pay-and-forget.  For example, some royalty-free license agreements state that once 5,000 people download your product, you pay an additional fee.

Summary: you must read the license agreements on the websites,  so you don’t miss an important detail.  For better or worse, the websites stuff their license agreements in your face so they’re easy to find.  Reading these sucks, but it only takes five minutes and is still better than spending years slogging over your music software.  And if you think they’re bad, try understanding royalty-free font agreements.  Yeah, welcome to the glamorous world of game development!  Where da ladies at?