you can make money as an X360 indie

[Poo Bear]

I've posted in other places how difficult it is to get on Xbox Live Arcade - there are many barriers in the way, too many for me anyway

However, you can make something using XNA and get a game on the indie channel for $99. I haven't looked at this yet myself, too busy. However, XNA is based on C# and believe me when I say that language is WAY WAY more productive than C++ (I think C# is only beaten by Ruby really, but nobody has made a fast enough compiler so it's no good for games). Keep the game simple and the reduced performance won't be an issue either.

Anyone can submit any game without going through a M$ employee and there is a voluntary system where other developers check your submission actually works and isn't full of porn or copyright material. Sweet!

Anyway, seems like people can in fact make some decent money:




Note - please do NOT undersell yourself. I'm going to check out a few of the top10 later on, so sure, maybe they are really incredibly basic, but are they REALLY only worth $1 ??? Talk about making it hard for yourself to make a living. I don't get much change from $1 buying a pack of mints!!! As I understand it you can charge anything up to $10 which seems like a reasonable policy. The number1 game sold 160,000 units at $1, now, there is no way he would have sold less if the price was $2.49 IMO and he would have more than doubled his money. Maybe everyone in the world is just a tight ***

[colinvella]

As I posted around here some time ago, XNA has a much lower barrier to entry than the XBLA route. A lot of the games are amateurish but some are very polished. And I also think that it attracts the right market for Starscape and Mr Robot. XNA ports with very little effort to the PC platform so it is also suitable as a cross-platform (X360, PC) solution.

Sigh.. if only I had time!!

[Konedima]

[colinvella]

I have similar problems here.. I don't live in an official country (as per the X360 definition of what constitutes a country). I have a UK account but some stuff is not available (Sky, Zune, 1 vs 100, code redemption for some addons etc.)