Major Success on Steam vs. Lackluster Success on Xbox Live Indie Games

A couple of weeks ago, we talked a bit about the difficulties indie developers endure in trying to both get published to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Indie Games program and more importantly, earn sufficient revenue to both survive and build up a company. About a week after our news item was posted, one XBLIG developer took its two $3 games to Valve’s Steam platform. The result? A good one.

In under a week of Zeboyd Games’ two titles, Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World, being put on Steam, the developer earned more money than it did in the first year-and-a-half of the same games being available in Xbox Live’s Indie Game channel.

With a report like that, it has to open someone’s eyes, whether it be someone in Microsoft or the multitude of independent developers. While one platform is a PC and the other a console, this has nothing to do with it, because the fact is, Zeboyd Games’ titles are ideal for either. What this all boils down to is exposure and nothing but.

As mentioned in our earlier post, while indie titles on the Xbox are hidden away deep within some grandiose hierarchy, on Steam, indie titles are treated in much the same way as blockbuster titles from the big guys. Once available, they appear on the front page, and if the name or image catches anyone’s eye, they can simply click on it and read information on it, view images, see things like the genre and other specs, and sometimes even watch a trailer. The amount of information easily given to the user far surpasses what either Xbox Live or PlayStation Network can muster. As a result, there’s a far greater chance that an indie developer’s title will be seen and purchased.

There’s no shortage of great indie titles on the PC as it is already, but hopefully this sort of thing will help open the eyes of console developers and cause more console-based indie titles to come to the PC (a la Limbo.)