Microsoft highlighted its Xbox Live Community Games initiative with the intent on fostering creative and original indie games through the XNA Game Studio development platform. It presents developers with a chance to push an Xbox 360 title of their very own over Xbox Live. Microsoft certainly talked a good game, promising that developers stood to make "more income from four months of sales than the average U.S. citizen earns in a full year". Yet as XNA game developers themselves are discovering now that Microsoft has provided its Community Games sales data for the period ending March, folks who intend on going the whole nine yards with their projects will need to be prepared for some "sobering" market realities.

Weapon of Choice (link), developed by Mommy's Best Games, was considered one of the early flagship offerings for the XBLCG initiative.  However, the developer explains in a blog posting that it only managed to secure sales of less than 10,000 units since launch last November 19th through last Thursday. That certainly translates into some revenue for the developer, but there are still other factors which hurt potential profitability.  As in "that hurts" level of sales.

Mommy's Best Games developer Nathan Fouts explains that at the very least, Microsoft will require a baseline cut of 30 percent and remittance rate off of any revenue. Fouts originally feared an additional 10-30 per cent cut applied for any featured advertising during the first 4 month sales, but there has since been clarification that Microsoft is no longer pushing for this fee. The climate is still gloomy when the developer factors in the additional costs of development outside of salaries, royalties to contractors, and of course, taxes:

What all that means to our bottom-line, we do not yet know, but it does not feel great. Maybe rational people hang up their keyboard and call it quits. But if you played Weapon of Choice, you realize we’re far from rational. We feel that Mommy’s Best Games has made a name for itself.

Fortunately, their enthusiasm for XNA development hasn't waned as they remain hard at work on their next offering. Fouts notes that to do even better the next time around, bringing "visibility and awareness to the platform" is in order for Microsoft.