NinjaBee games now on Amazon!

(So, this should have been a quick and easy post with a link to our Amazon page, but it's turned into a rambling paragraph on the coolness of this service and all else in between. You decide if you want to read the whole thing. If you don't, I don't blame you. Here's the link to the NinjaBee Amazon page, and the XBLA Amazon page. If you do read the whole thing, leave a comment so I can know how cool you are :))

Wow, this is pretty cool. Now you can buy all of our Xbox LIVE Arcade games (and most other Arcade games) on Amazon.com! This is exceptionally sweet because you can use real money and you can gift the game to anyone via email. In my opinion, this makes it tons easier for anyone to buy a game.

For instance, let's say grandma wants to buy some games for her grandkids. Before they were on Amazon, she had to own a console (well, the grandkids' console, really) and buy Microsoft Points so she could pay for the games and then she had to figure out how to download them to the console. Things got a bit easier thanks to the NXE updates, when granny could buy the games online, but only if she knew the account and password of her grandkids' accounts to use the online marketplace and buy the games, where she still had to convert her real money into Microsoft Points (which she probably didn't understand and definitely wouldn't use again). Now, however, she simply goes to Amazon.com, types in the game she wants to buy, enters her payment information, and it spits out a code she then sends via email to her grandkids by pushing the "Send as a Gift" button once she's purchased the game. The grateful (and probably shocked) grandkids then enter the code into their Xbox 360 and Voila! They have the game!

Here's what our NinjaBee page looks like on Amazon.com:


I bought a copy of A Kingdom for Keflings yesterday to try it out and it's incredibly easy; no extra hoops to fly through, only the normal Amazon procedure. In fact, it was so easy, I accidentally purchased a copy--I only wanted to go through the steps up to the purchase page, but there were so few steps I over-estimated and ended up buying a copy. Have you tried it yet? What are your thoughts?

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?