Random, Fun, Interesting Links

Here are some cool and extremely random links to things that have popped up over the last week or so that relate (in some form or another) to NinjaBee . Enjoy!

Random Link #1: NinjaBee has a public profile and a great relationship with Gathering of Gamers, a social networking site for gamers. A few NinjaBees appeared on their GOGCast (a community podcast) season finale a few weeks ago and talked about A Kingdom for Keflings, life at NinjaBee and a few other interesting things. The podcast is pretty long, so if you just want to hear the NinjaBee stuff, it starts about 12 1/2 min. into the show. There's also a special audio clip right at the end, about 1 hour and 20 mins. into the show...:)


Random Link #2: Here's a cool YouTube video of a guy who covers XBLA songs. This rocks!




Random Link #3: Jeremy Throckmorton, one of our designers, was interviewed by Genesis Device, a cool gaming website. Check out his interview here. Here's a fun snippet from the interview (that just happens to go with the above video!):

Genesis Device: Where did the music for Kingdom come from? It's completely addictive!

Jeremy Throckmorton: Eric Nunamaker is a long time friend of ours, and a very talented composer we contract for many of our projects. We decided on a style and feel for Keflings and presented it to him. He is really, really good at making music to match our odd requests and abstract concepts. The soundtrack to Keflings is a testament to that.


Random Link #4: Michelle, the cool girl who made the A Kingdom for Keflings web comic has made a Doritos Dash of Destruction one as well.

The Potential Live Arcade User Base

So according to Mark Kroese, General Manager of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Advertising Business Group, Doritos Dash of Destruction has amassed almost 1 million downloads since its launch on Dec. 17. That sounds like a huge number, right? But, when you take into account that MS just announced that the Xbox LIVE community has grown to 17 million members, that 1 million suddenly doesn't seem as big.

(I bet that Doritos Truck felt big, until those huge dinosaurs flanked him...)



So herein lies the question that Brent and I were discussing this morning: if there are 17 million LIVE users and only 1 million downloaded Dash of Destruction, a FREE Live Arcade game, are there only 1 million people who actually connect to the internet on their Xbox? Or are there 16 million people who don't notice and/or don't care about LIVE Arcade games?

We all know it's silly to think only 1 million people connect to the internet on their Xbox given how many people play big retail games like Halo 3 and Gears of War 2 over LIVE. So, even if we say there are 15 million people who don't notice and/or don't care about LIVE Arcade games (because there are probably around one million people who don't connect their Xbox to the internet at all), that's still 15 million people who aren't playing Xbox Live Arcade games!!! There's obviously a huge market out there that is completely untapped. And seeing as how Live Arcade is our livelihood, we, as well as the other 100 or so Live Arcade developers, need to figure out how to tap that market...Any thoughts?