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One problem for indie game developers on WP7 is that Microsoft pushes Xbox Live titles in front of everything else in the 'games' tab of the Marketplace app (th

by kranner 15y ago

One problem for indie game developers on WP7 is that Microsoft pushes Xbox Live titles in front of everything else in the 'games' tab of the Marketplace app (the equivalent of the iOS 'App Store' app). I'm no expert but it appears that getting XBL status isn't trivial or guaranteed. The situation is made worse, in my opinion, because of the Metro design aesthetic; after all that whitespace there is room for only 3 app icons in the 'games' tab on my Lumia 710. If you drill down via games->genres, there is room for 5.5 app icons. And the first two tabs in games->genres are 'Xbox live' (all XBL titles) and 'top' (again, all XBL titles).

brandf 15y ago
[Taptitude Developer Here] Yes, I agree with what you're saying. We too feel like XBL titles get pushed far too heavily, which turns away indies. That being said, I don't believe its possible for a small indie studio like ours to compete with Zynga types on iOS either due to the delta in marketing budgets. Our reason for disclosing our data is to show indie studios that they may be missing an opporunity on windows phone.
- kranner 15y ago
  Thanks for the disclosure! It looks like you guys have put in a lot of effort too with the 60+ minigames. What I'm wondering is whether the same effort on iOS might not have fetched greater returns given the same marketing budget. Anyway, congratulations!
  - sfurtwangler 15y ago
    [Taptitude Dev Here] I'll second what Brandf said. Despite the Xbox Live games being front and center, we think being one of the highest rated free games helped Taptitude get noticed. If we released the same game (same effort put into both programming and marketing) on iOS, I don't think it would have gotten as much attention.
polyfractal 15y ago
It's even more unfortunate because about half of the XBL titles are 'meh' at best. Some are really good, some are pretty poor and pushing out far better indie games

by kranner 15y ago

brandf 15y ago

[Taptitude Developer Here] Yes, I agree with what you're saying. We too feel like XBL titles get pushed far too heavily, which turns away indies. That being said, I don't believe its possible for a small indie studio like ours to compete with Zynga types on iOS either due to the delta in marketing budgets. Our reason for disclosing our data is to show indie studios that they may be missing an opporunity on windows phone.

kranner 15y ago
Thanks for the disclosure! It looks like you guys have put in a lot of effort too with the 60+ minigames. What I'm wondering is whether the same effort on iOS might not have fetched greater returns given the same marketing budget. Anyway, congratulations!
- sfurtwangler 15y ago
  [Taptitude Dev Here] I'll second what Brandf said. Despite the Xbox Live games being front and center, we think being one of the highest rated free games helped Taptitude get noticed. If we released the same game (same effort put into both programming and marketing) on iOS, I don't think it would have gotten as much attention.

polyfractal 15y ago

It's even more unfortunate because about half of the XBL titles are 'meh' at best. Some are really good, some are pretty poor and pushing out far better indie games