XBox Live Arcade Analysis, and some PSN

In a world where speculation is often passed along as truth, it's nice to get a dose of data now and then. Here's some from XBox Live Arcade: April's numbers. It's interesting to note some comparisons between XBox Live and PSN; the number of players for Capcom's Final Fight was actually higher for PSN. Seems like the price drop for the PS3 has now made the unit quite competitive. It doesn't hurt that you get a Blu-Ray player in your PS3, either. (Now there's some upcoming news about PSN debuting a premium network soon, to compete even more with XBox Live... cross-game chatting, free games, downloads of full games, and best of all, cloud-based game saves. Yum.)

As you can see from the list, the top games can hit over 1 million players... and then there are many games in the low thousands. Still, it's a wide range, and there's plenty of room for moving up in the numbers if you can do some effective marketing. Major Nelson promoted one game as a 33% off sale for one day, and that boosted numbers by about 6,000 over what would have been expected.

The marketplace for downloads continues to evolve, and the marketing tools tend to lag behind. It's really necessary to put some creativity into the marketing efforts, not just the game development.