[Hostile]

I tried the game and passed on it when it was released. I can't speak for the general public, but it was not a failure of marketing for me. It just wasn't enough to get me to spend money on it. It was polished, and not bad, just... sort of forgettable and average. It would be a big assumption for me to assume that my experiences are more consistent with what happened to the game in reality, but the article doesn't tell us how many trial downloads went along with the poor sales either.

[pestaa]

There is a huge need for polished games under the radar. Even the forgettable part is forgivable. Polished is above average.

(I don't mean you should have bought the game. All I say is I don't understand why it didn't generate more sales in the indie community.)

[Hostile]

Polish is nice to have, sure, but if nobody wants to actually play the delivered experience, all the polish in the world won't save it. Nobody should buy a game just because it's polished. While I'd prefer polish on all my games, I'll take an unpolished dwarf fortress over a polished forgettable uncompelling game any day of the week).

As a side note, I'm not sure what rule I've broken to get downvoted. I pointed out that there could be more to this story, and that we don't have solid data on how many trial downloads there were (which is a MUCH better indicator than sales is regarding "marketing" in this case).

For those unfamiliar with XBLA, just about everyone downloads a trial first (every game on XBLA is required to have a free trial, so you'd have to be pretty impulsive to skip it completely), and then you can buy the game from within the trial version's interface.

If the point of the comments here on HN is to add to the discussion, I'm not really sure what I did to justify a downvote. I'm just getting started commenting here and don't really have karma to spare. I really try hard to be a positive member of the site, so If somebody sees this and can point out what I can avoid doing in the future, that'd be appreciated.

[timknauf]

You're doing fine. Just don't panic about downvotes so loudly -- that's one thing that is considered bad form, if I remember correctly.