XBLC games not "financially viable"
"Market is too small," says Clover dev.
Clover developer Binary Tweed believes the Xbox Live Community Games market is too small to be "financially viable", and that the service's only use is as an "arena for proving concepts".
"It's a shame to say that Clover has not sold as many copies as we'd hoped for. As it stands, through Community Games alone, we definitely won't recoup costs," Binary Tweed boss Daniel Jones told Digital Spy.
"Frustratingly enough, the critical reception to the game has been good," he added, as if reading Eurogamer's Clover review aloud. "The size of the XBLCG market is prohibitively small to be financially viable, so I can only see it being of use to Binary Tweed as an arena for proving concepts."
The Xbox Live Community Games channel arrived last November as part of the New Xbox Experience. The idea is to let XNA-tooled community developers create games, share them and vote the best examples to the top and to release. The goal was to democratise game development.
But Daniels argues that all this has produced is a glut of Xbox 360 applications, and that people don't head to the channel looking for games at all.
"The problem is that the Community Games market is just too small," said Daniels, "and the people buying titles via the service don't seem at all interested in games.
"In the first week of Clover's release, the top 10 CG titles were made [up] of eight applications, RC-Airsim (which seems to be having a self-fulfilling prophecy at the top) and one edutainment game," Daniels offered.
Clover costs 400 Microsoft Points (GBP 3.40 / EUR 4.80) and is available to download now. You can find out more about making a game for the Community Games Channel on the XNA Creators Club website.
Check out our Xbox Live Community Game roundup to see what the world has been making.