In the lobby of my Office, there’s an Xbox 360 with a full Rock Band setup, several retail titles, and essentially every Xbox Live Arcade game published thus far available for people to play.  Once in a while, you’ll find someone’s kids out in the lobby playing with it while their parents finish up some work for the day.

Presently there’s two boys playing outside, and of all the games they have available, they’re playing the XBLA version of the 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game.

I burned a lot of hours playing that game as a kid.  I guess some things never change.

Having now successfully returned from Toronto without DHS dragging me off into a dungeon, time is largely sunk into being at work and getting the new Xbox Live Experience ready to go.  I will however, be at PAX this weekend, so if you’re going, let me know.

Major Nelson will be there showing off the new Xbox Live Experience, so if you don’t want to talk to me, you should at least go check that out and talk to him.  He’ll be in booth 412 at 10:30 and 3:30 on both Sat. and Sun.

In today’s issue of Counting Rupees, Jeff Engel talked about why the sales figures for Braid are a bad sign for the casual game industry.

His arguement is essentially that when you do the math, Braid has sold 55k copies (according to public estimates) at 15 bucks each, which translates into $825,000.  You have to multiply this by 70% to get the developers cut, and then do a bunch of math to account for localization fees, certification, and development costs.

Jeff Engel makes the claim that in order for Braid to achieve its goal of completely financing the next game Blow wants to make, the magic number of sales Braid would have to achieve is something like 100k copies.  Jeff’s concern is that many games don’t sell those kinds of numbers.

My response to this would be that I have absolutely no doubt that Braid will hit and exceed 100k copies, that’s virtually a certainty.  Digitally distributed games certainly don’t have the market penetration that sales at brick and mortar stores do, but by the same token, the costs are significantly less.  XBLA arcade sales should follow a long tail distribution - meaning that after only two weeks of sales, the majority of the income from Braid is yet to be seen.

While it might be true that many games don’t reach 100k in sales, that’s true when you sell your shovelware game at Gamestop too, and at least there you’re not giving a cut to the retailer, another cut to bribe the retailer into showing your title promenantly for three days, another cut for manufacturing and distribution, and an even bigger cut to the publisher.

I’m going to be out of town for a few days, so no new posts until next week.

Somewhere along the line I missed this announcement.  Codemasters is making three new Overlord games, a sequel to the first for Xbox 360, an two new titles for the Wii and DS.  Codemasters, to you, I would like to say two things:

First, thank you for not just announcing Overlord 2 for the 360, Wii, and DS, branding all three games as the same, when really they’re totally different, as some companies I know have often done.

Secondly, the first game was highly amusing, but if you put in achievements that require me to grind myself retarded, again, I will be extremely displeased.  You make your game worse by doing this.  Cut it the fuck out.