$5000 To Market Your Indie Game on Xbox One

Last Month saw the surprise arrival of 60 Second Shooter Prime appear on the Xbox One game store. The title, created by Happion Labs was one of the first titles to be published through Microsoft’s ID@Xbox program. Whilst I haven’t yet had the pleasure of playing the game my ears pricked up after the developer published a blog post outlining his costs to publish the game on Xbox.

I’m sure a lot of you may have thought as I did during those first few months of the Xbox One; if anyone released a game now, they would get their arm bitten off due to the lack of titles to play.

This look behind the game development curtain is sure to inspire as well as prepare developers thinking of taking the plunge and approaching ID@Xbox. It makes me wonder how many of those Kickstarter campaigns that have stretch goals to publish to Xbox One took insurance into consideration.

[one_half]Task [/one_half] [one_half_last]Cost in USD $[/one_half_last] [one_half]Maintaining the Sixty Second Shooter URL [/one_half] [one_half_last]19[/one_half_last] [one_half]Sending the second dev kit to Brett Douville [/one_half] [one_half_last]63[/one_half_last] [one_half]Hardware (usb and video cables and the like) [/one_half] [one_half_last]72[/one_half_last] [one_half]Video capture device (for making trailer) [/one_half] [one_half_last]181[/one_half_last] [one_half]Localization (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) [/one_half] [one_half_last]729[/one_half_last] [one_half]E&O Insurance [/one_half] [one_half_last]2037[/one_half_last] [one_half]Foreign ratings boards (PEGI, USK)  [/one_half] [one_half_last]2042[/one_half_last] [one_half]Total:[/one_half] [one_half_last]5143[/one_half_last]

The largest expenditure was the Errors & Omissions Insurance. The blog post said that

“Microsoft requires this; it’s in the contract. And it’s not just any E&O Insurance – it has to cover IP and copyright violations, so the cheap E&O Insurance you can easily find online doesn’t qualify. I went through an insurance broker (Parker, Smith, and Feek) and found the cheapest insurance that would qualify.”

Secondly, there was the ratings boards that came it at over $2000, which was another requirement from Microsoft.

“if you want to release in a given territory, you have to get your game rated by the official ratings boards of that territory.”

“if you want to release in a given territory, you have to get your game rated by the official ratings boards of that territory.”

He went on to say that he skipped both Australia and New Zealand due to the fact that they both wanted around $2K for their ratings boards.

With certain costs inevitable, it will make it easier for other developers budget for release on the Xbox Store.

Source: Happion Labs