Duty Calls

The first release for the month of December was Activision's Call Of Duty Classic, a port of the PC original to coincide with the release of Modern Warfare 2. The game was given away in vast quantities with the Hardened Edition of MW2, so it's a little difficult to calculate overall sales from Leaderboards. We do know it hit the second spot of the Top 10 list in its second week, but completely dropped off by the third.

QIX For Kicks

Taito’s somewhat simplistic remake of QIX for the Xbox Live Arcade was the second new release. Despite no official word on the game until its release week, it ended up doing better than I would have expected, but still far lower than it could have. Its sales have dropped off quite significantly, and as of December only had 5,413 players on the Leaderboards.

Alien Armageddon

Team 17’s expensive revival of their cult classic Alien Breed franchise was a big risk for the Yorkshire developer – an episodic action game that supposedly will cost around 2.5 million dollars in the long run. Unfortunately it does not appear to have paid off for them.

For its first week the game only had 4,597 players on its Leaderboards, and by the end of the month had 9,001 players. In fact, the developer's own Worms 2: Armageddon, which was reduced in price for a single day during the same week, ended up selling more in total that week.

The problem now is how they intend to continue on with the series, or if they will at all. The second and third episodes can probably only sell as well as the original episode, with a high chance of doing less. Telltale has learned this the hard way with their Wallace & Gromit series.

Tecmo’s Puzzlegeddon was also released the same week, but like a lot of other puzzle games, it seemed to have been dismissed entirely. The game does not have Leaderboards that we can follow -- but it also did not hit the Top 10 for its opening week.

Attack On Polar Bears

The final two releases of 2009 were Square Enix’s 0 Day Attack on Earth for $15, and Eiconic Games' Polar Panic for $10. As there were no new releases the week after, these games both got two weeks in the top spot. Despite this, neither did that well.

0 Day Attack On Earth did the best of the two, with 2,504 players in its first week, but dropping to 832 in the second -- for a total of 3,336 players in December. Polar Panic, however, only mustered around 700 players total between the Easy and Normal modes for the first Chapter.

For Polar Panic it got pretty decent reviews, but it seems like the premise itself wasn’t enticing to players. Perhaps it lacks personality and suffered from it, despite the large amount of content the game includes?

Their promotion of the game wasn’t particularly good either – it’s got a good official website, it has several trailers, but major websites like Joystiq and Kotaku didn't actually mention the game prior to release. Difficult to know whether you can always get coverage on the big sits, but sometimes you need to throw a game under people’s noses before they react to it.

Deals Of The Week – A Platformer Trifecta

Over December there were plenty of deals to be had. Three regular titles were made cheap for a week each, and Microsoft held a “12 Days Of Christmas” calendar special, where one piece of online content would be made cheap for a single day.

The first deal was Sonic 2, which was brought down from $5 to $3. This is the first time a $5 game has been made cheap since the beginning of the promotion. It added over 25,000 new players in just that week.

Similarly Shadow Complex, which went down from $15 to $10, saw a large boost in sales from its regular 3,000 a week to 32,000. With both these titles, you can see that even after their sale, more people bought the game at full retail price - along with some latecomers to loading it up, perhaps. However, Sonic 2 even made it into the Top 10 the week after it was on special -- I've heard this happens a lot, due to people finding the game in the top-selling list and trying it out.

Twisted Pixel’s The Maw was also a week long deal, and added over 21,000 players to its Leaderboards in that one week, far more than the 3-400 a week it had been getting. What’s good to see is that a lot of people also picked up the extra stages alongside it, with those selling 10 times more than they had been previously.

Deals Of The Day

Due to difficulties in tracking specific stats from a lot of the Deals Of The Day, we were unable to get exact statistics for a lot of these deals. With both Battlefield 1943 and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 neither had Leaderboards we can follow, and there was no Top 10 for those weeks. Let’s just assume it did very well for each of them.

Worms 2: Armageddon was the first sale from the list, and while we don’t have Leaderboard statistics, we do know it was the best selling game of that week thanks to the sale.

Based on last month’s charts, UNO Rush was adding roughly 1,500 players a month, while Monkey Island was adding over 4,000. UNO Rush climbed an extra 6,338 players in December while Monkey Island scored 9,257 players, so the sales certainly helped both of them. Castle Crashers, being the phenomenon it already was, soared to over 53,000 new players during this week, thanks to the half price day.

Expansion Packs Boast Big Numbers

December was surprisingly a big month for downloadable content – Trials HD released its first DLC expansion pack, while the 2009 hit Kingdoom For Keflings finally got some new maps for its users to play with, plus the ever popular Peggle Nights continues to go strong.

The Peggle Nights DLC for PopCap's original game continues very strong alongside its main game – some weeks it’s been selling more than the new users to the main title. It managed to double its November sales, with an extra 21,912 players in December. The Peggle DLC has now sold to 14% of the Peggle userbase.

While we don’t have specific Leaderboards for the Keflings downloadable content, we can see that, following the DLC release (November 9th), the game saw the sales of the main game double throughout December. With the new exposure, coupled with Christmas, it has done well for NinjaBee.

The Trials HD DLC on the other hand, much like the game itself, has far exceeded expectations. 91,382 people had played the first extra course from the Trials HD “Big Pack”, an astonishing number. Just like Peggle, this is 14% of the userbase of Trials HD owners.

Weekly Leaderboards - The Christmas Boost

Outside of new releases, we also look at a select few titles and their Leaderboards each week. We usually do this to decipher data from the Top 10 lists, but due to a lack of those, we’re unable to use the data effectively.

Instead it shows something a little different – the Christmas boost. For the majority of the games we followed, the week of December 21st and 28th showed a dramatic increase in new players. Peggle gained 2,000 new players each week, and Castle Crashers doubled its weekly player base, as did 'Splosion Man and UNO.

Games that didn’t do quite so well are mostly new releases – Gyromancer and Diner Dash specifically, but they are also currently going through a traditional sales decline after launch. The expanded player base likely made them drop less than they would have otherwise.

The 20 Most Played Games For 2009

Much like last year, Larry Hyrb has releases a Top 20 list of the most played games of 2009. It is based on the unique amount of users who have purchased Xbox Live Arcade titles this year.

Battlefield was the big hit this year, with over a million uniques across both the XBLA and PSN versions, while Castle Crashers still reigns supreme, after being available since August 2008. In the 70 weeks that it has been available, it has never once dropped from the weekly Top 10 list.

Trials HD has had over 640,000 players play its game, and it truly is a phenomenon that surpassed everyone's expectations. Shadow Complex comes just behind it, followed by Hasbro Family Game Night, with just over 400,000 unique users.

This list also reveals some evergreen titles that continue to sell years after their release. UNO continues to be one of the best selling Xbox Live Arcade titles, 4 years since its release. Two other releases from 2006 also appear – Marble Blast Ultra and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, both which are part of the “hits” line-up, and are now only $5 purchases. Much like Mortal Kombat II on the PlayStation Network, you just can’t get rid of Mortal Kombat.

For 2007 titles Worms and Ninja Turtles 1989 held up very well. Worms had a permanent price drop to $5 alongside UMK3 in late 2008 and reigned on the Top 10 for 33 weeks – only dropping off thanks to the sequel being released.

Let’s compare between 2008 and 2009’s Top lists:

In comparison to 2008, which had 14 releases of that year in the Top 20, 2009 only had 12. Both Marble Blast and Mortal Kombat also had spots last year, but in a strange twist, TMNT 1989 was not on the 2008 list, but appeared in 2009. Perhaps the announcement of Turtles In Time boosted interest in the original again.

The Big List

This list consists of 88 titles which we’re able to read the Leaderboard data of, but does not include the new releases.

Past the weekly Top 10, you can see some games still doing well after the fact – both Banjo Kazooie titles, Defense Grid, Diner Dash, Geometry Wars 2, even N+ continues without much of a hitch. However some of the more recent titles, like 0D Beat Drop and the Wallace & Gromits, are not doing as well.

Thanks to Sonic 2 being a deal of the week, it has now beaten Sonic 1 in terms of unique users. All Sonic titles now seem to sell an average of 5,000 copies a month – so $100,000 is spent on Sonic per month on the Xbox Live Arcade. It’ll be interesting to see how Sonic Adventure holds up in comparison. It’s no wonder why Game Room was revealed.

2010 – The Future

The new year has started off with some big contenders – Serious Sam HD is already off to a big start, but we’ll also be seeing Vandal Hearts: Flame Of Judgement and Death By Cube – titles that are a little different from the usual set of games on the system. Vandal Hearts especially – a tactical RPG for $15 is an interesting proposal, but will it be any good? Let's find out next month.