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Microsoft killed our release

29 12 11 - 15:38 I, Zombie is the game I mentioned in my previous entry. It was developed mostly by my brother Mariusz. I helped him a bit with programming and design, and Andrzej handled the art. It took over two months to develop and we released it on XBLIG on December 16th, here's what it looks like:



Sadly, Microsoft killed our release.

First, our game didn't appear on the first position on New Releases list - it popped up on #4 slot instead due to a technical issue on Microsoft's side. To make things worse, soon another couple games were released and the game was not even visible on the first page. As a result, during the first three days we got only 1600 trial downloads. Oozi Ep. 2 got over 4000 in its first three days and Avatar Fantasy RPG got over 4500. So we'd get at least three times more trial downloads if things were going normally (zombie games are very popular on XBLIG).

Second, Top Downloads list froze the same day we released the game. It "unstuck" four days later, and unfortunately it took into account only the last day of downloads data, when we were already pushed far off the first page of New Releases list. The game appeared on #40 slot.

Sadly, as a result of those two issues we're not going to make any significant money on the game, despite decent user rating (3,75/5) and great critic reviews (10/10 on XboxHornet.com, 9/10 on XBLARatings.com and 5/5 on Armless Octopus). We were even lucky enough to have the game mentioned on GameSpot.com and on IndieGames.com, but it didn't help much. Up until now we got only 3500 trials and 800 sales, which is way worse than any other game we ever released.

That's why right now we're busy porting the game to Unity. We're probably going to abandon XNA as soon as we finish Oozi.