Racketboy

The XBox Live Arcade has been a haven from old-school gamers on the cutting-edge console and so far, developers are making a nice pocket-full of cash from all the XBLA downloads.

Author Doug Walsh has been taking a look at the numbers behind Xbox Live Arcade (additional commentary availible from Gamasutra). Here are some of the numbers he posted based on games he has personally downloaded from XBLA with a couple of corrections for the comments section included and from this Digg post:

• Frogger ($5 US) – 115,998 users = $580,000 in sales.
• Bejeweled 2 ($10 US) – 115,466 users = $1,150,000 in sales.
• Geometry Wars Evolved ($5 US) – 204,640 users = $1,023,000 in sales.
• Uno ($5 US) – 180,703 users = $903,500 in sales.
• Galaga ($5 US) – 43,560 users = $218,000 in sales.
• Street Fighter II ($10 US) – 17,914 users = $180,000 in sales.

Keep in mind that this post was written back in August, so Street Fighter II hadn’t been out very long at that time. You wouldn’t initially think that such low-cost games could make so much money, but the developers should be very happy.

It will be interesting to see how this trend continues as more games get added to the XBLA lineup and competition heats up. You will probably see a very similar trend once the Wii’s Virtual Console service kicks into gear.

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