Revenue for XBLA has risen 41% in the first six months of the year, according to Edge. And which game leads the pack?
In its report, Fade claims that XBLA revenue reached $66.2 million in the first half of 2011, with seven new releases grossing more than a million dollars. The best-selling was Microsoft’s own Full House Poker, which sold 268,000 units and made $2.7 million in revenue; the highest-grossing was Runic Games’ Torchlight, which grossed $3.6 million from sales of 238,000 units thanks to its higher price point.
Full House Poker. Gotta admit, didn’t see that coming.
As for the top sellers for 2011 thus far:
1. Full House Poker (Microsoft Game Studios)
2. Torchlight (Runic Games)
3. Magic: The Gathering 2012 (Stainless Steel Games)
4. Trials HD (RedLynx)
5. Beyond Good & Evil HD (Ubisoft)
6. Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale (Atari)
7. Ilomilo (SouthEnd Interactive)
8. Dead Rising 2: Case West (Capcom)
9. Limbo (Playdead)
10. Family Game Night (Hasbro)
Oh those poor Daggerdale people.
I’m surprised it tops this list, but it may be the best console poker game in the last two generations. You get realistic blind structures, and plenty of time at each level. The XP system rewards smart play, and that has actually led to a better pool of people to play with online.
It’s not perfect, but it is pretty close. they just need to find a good way to force players to jump through a hoop in order to re-load. It will make the money you earn more valuable online, which wil encourage players to take care and try not to lose it. Lossing money has to hurt for gambling games to work.
But poker gets around this by using tournament style, which makes playing the same as any other board game. You are trying to outlast opponents. So the online play can still be a lot of fun.
But on topic, you could buy a 360 and live just off of XBLA games and the system would be worth the price of admission. there is a ton of great stuff on their now, and more on the way.
Agreed, Well, not w/ the poker part as I simply am ignorant to those games.
But XBLA is on fire right now.
From Dust..add that to the list, too…
I can’t wait for From Dust…all of the Summer of Arcade games look damn good apart from Fruit Ninja Kinect…the Toy Soldiers sequel looks like a blast (loved the first), Crimson Alliance is kind of the wild card but could be a good action RPG, Shadow Planet I’ve been looking at for years now…and Bastion…well…Bastion is on my GotY shortlist.
Just a RIDICULOUSLY good year for XBLA…we’ve also had Bangai-O HD, Outland, Vampire Smile…even the Warhammer game turned out to be pretty good.
How the hell did Ilomilo get on that list?
I think is is a refection of the price post yesterday. They can charge the price they do and make a ton of money and everybody wins. I’m not a fan of DLC and hate buying downloadable games because I can’t pass them on to my brother or sis-n-law afterwards, but I do own 4 of the games on that list. I also picked up half a dozen others and some indie too (everybody should own Epic Dungeon). Heck, I even bought Hydrophobia and enjoyed it. As someone else said you could just use XBLA and indie games and the Xbox would be worth it.