Top Indie game made its creator £68,000 last year

[sambo]

Analysis of 2009's top Xbox Live Indie games has revealed that the creator of the most successful release, distinctively-soundtracked top-down shooter I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMB1ES!!!1 netted £68,000 in the year.

The analysis of Major Nelson's figures and data contributed by the game developers themselves, posted at GamerBytes, shows that the game's 160,000 sales at one dollar each translated to $112,000 cash for developer James Silva, under the 70/30 royalty split on the service.
And he wasn't the biggest winner of the year - that honor goes to R/C AirSim, which brought in $129,000 off lower sales thanks to a higher price.

It proves that the service is able to provide substantial income for certain developers, but there are plenty of others who haven't made a bean. As the article points out, spaceship shooter Dual Zone needed to sell 10,000 copies to break even - but managed only 21 sales in its first week. That's an extreme case, but there are plenty of other games that missed their chance on the first week of release and then slipped into obscurity once they'd dropped off the New Releases list.

[NeuroticSarge]

Good luck to him!