Published August 29, 2017
As August comes near a close and the inevitable closing of the Xbox Live Indie Games storefront, we're going to take a quick look at the list of the 30 top-selling titles on the service (at the time of writing) just to get an idea of what the best-sellers on the service were.
Out of the top 30 best-sellers, 6 of those games were Minecraft-inspired block mining/building type games, 10 of them had the word "Avatar" in their titles, only 3 titles with zombies featured on them (surprising as this was such a common theme) and a then there's a smattering of other random games. As somebody who played quite a large sampling of games on XBLIG over the years, I was a bit surprised to see that out of the 30 top-sellers, I'd actually only downloaded the trials for 5 of them and, to be quite honest, I have absolutely no desire to look at the others I haven't tried. Nothing against anybody who created these or folks who downloaded them, but the Minecraft knock-offs just don't appeal to me at all and neither do any of the "Avatar" titles, which usually feature extremely generic team-deathmatch variants. I can understand why these would have appeal (especially to kids and teens), selling for just a buck when the titles they imitate cost anywhere from $20-60.
Within the 30 best-sellers we can also find a few of the more questionable "games," such as Try Not To Fart and Baby Maker Extreme. There are a few genuinely good games in the top 30, such as Miner Dig Deep and The Impossible Game, but for the most part the best-sellers on the platform are in no way indicative of the best games on the service. In my opinion it really sucks that games like Try Not To Fart are out-selling high-quality titles like Wizorb or Ninja Bros. Judging from the top-selling titles here, perhaps the reason so many excellent games (many retro-inspired) that got buried in the store is that the general age demographic of gamers browsing the store just didn't care for such titles, many of which suffered from underwhelming sales. There were at least a few genuinely good games top-sellers list, which is quite an accomplishment as it was quite difficult to pick up much traction on the platform.
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