Greg Canessa, the group manager in charge of Live Arcade, said the trial of Geometry Wars has been downloaded over 200K times and sold nearly 45K copies adding, "Geometry Wars has been our Halo." The article on MTV gets some industry reaction to Microsoft's Arcade service and to GW in particular; Epic's CliffyB calls it "an interactive version of those acid-trip musical visualization devices."
Geometry Wars' developer, Stephen Cakebread of Bizarre Creations, originally planned on having mazes and multiplayer functionaltiy in the sequel to the original Geometry Wars, which appeared in Project Gotham Racing 2. (Tip from Cakebread: the game stops getting harder around 5 million points, the only challenge then is staying alive as long as possible!) MTV says, "Developers interviewed for this story estimated that the cost to create a Live Arcade game could run between $10,000 to $100,000." Let's take the extreme example and say Microsoft takes 50% of the sale from the game and that Geometry Wars cost $100,000, Bizarre has still made a 12.5% profit in under two months!
Canessa said to expect 35 Arcade titles by summer, with new games arriving each week! I'm calling it: first game to unseat Geometry Wars for most popular Arcade title will be Street Fighter II.
[Thanks, m3mnoch]
