One of the first XNA Community Games available was Word Soup. Developer Big Fizz Games have become quite popular with their version of the game which have been distributed to hundreds of pubs across Great Britain.

The game on the XNA Community Games is the same as the version available on PCs with the addition of a widescreen mode and a new control scheme. Compared to other statistics we have gathered it has done very well, close to 10,000 sales and with a conversion rate close to 20%. As a game that is 400 Microsoft Points, it's the kind of thing we want to see on the XNA Community Games.

The other side of the matter is ZoomaRoom. A deceptively simple puzzle platformer where you must use your bouncing ability, along with whatever you pick up, to beat each level. The game contains 70 premade levels and allows other players to build and swap their own levels. Despite many positive impressions it hasn't done as well as it could have. It appears that the game was quickly pushed past the new releases list and was not able to return to the popularity list, selling only close to 400 copies at this point in time.

What we will begin to discuss this week are some of the trends we've seen in the XNA Community Games space. Specifically we've asked several developers on what their best day of sales were, and what the drop off tended to be. Below are 4 games that participated in these statistics.

What we found was that the top day of sales was the first day of being available, and therefore on the new release list. Not so surprising really, but still an interesting tidbit when understanding how the Xbox Live Markerplace currently works. ZP2K9 is the anomaly, which did well in its first day of sales, yet peaked some weeks later on the 15th. Unfortunately I nor the developer James Silva could figure out what caused the sudden surge.

Using the data that we've culminated, we've also gathered some averages for each game, how many games they've been selling per day, as well as their daily earnings. Games that have been out for longer will have lower money per day.

In the next few days we will be discussing other trends, including sales and conversion rates once a game has dropped from the new release list, and which regions the games are currently selling through to.