Xbox Live Indie Games was the first major initiative from any sort of distributor to give indie gamers a real place to call their own. Sure, services like Steam and Direct2Drive each have their own indie channels, but the Xbox 360 channel means so much more symbolically. It’s a dedicated section on the world’s second largest console (by unit numbers) where downloading games has already begun to make serious in roads.

Anyways while perusing the section I came across some interesting statistics that I’ve worked out for you guys… complete with graphs and everything!

1. Out of the channel’s 548 games only 12 of those scored higher than 4 stars, or 80/100 if you prefer a more numerical score rating. That’s just over 2% of all games. Breaking it down a bit further shows that 186 games made it  between the 3 and 4 star mark, or 60-79/100 (although it should be noted that many of those games were at 3 stars exact). That’s just about 34% of all the games. Finally we have 219 games that fall between the 2 and 3 star mark, or 40-59/100 which comes out to about 40% of all XBLIGs. And finally we have 28 games that fall between the 1 and 2 star mark, or 20-39/100. That’s just over 5%. There were no games that had a 5 star and no games that had below a 1 star.

2. Of the top ten best selling Indie Games only about 6 of them are actual games. Actually, I gave Avatar Drop and Kodu Game Lab a half point each. Avatar Drop is more of an interactive screensaver than anything else, with the ability to keep scores the only thing keeping it from being a screensaver all together. Kodu Game Lab is more of a game builder than an actual game. Yes  it comes with some games and you can play your own games, but, by and large, it’s designed to give beginning designers the basic knowledge of what goes into making a game. Those two points are my opinion, of course, so feel free to argue with me if you want.

3. Of the top ten highest rated games, only two made it into the top ten best selling games. They are, of course, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 and Avatar Drop… which I still argue is only half a game.

4.Of the top ten least rated games 8 of them are not even games at all… mostly screensavers actually. Is there anybody out there who actually wants to leave their Xbox on? Seems like a risk to me.

Interesting stuff huh? Some more quick tidbits that aren’t included in graph form:

• The highest selling game is actually RC-AirSim, not I MAED A GAME WITH ZOMBIES!!!1.
• Rumble Massage is the third best selling game…
• Xbox Live Indie Games has it’s own fart machine… Is nothing sacred?
• I MAED A GAME WITH ZOMBIES!!!1 is the only game to have more than 10000 ratings. I could be wrong, but I checked twice and didn’t find any.
• There are, at least, four different massage “games” on the channel… all of them in the top 25 for sales.

Anyways, it was a slow night for me so this was the fruits of that boredom. So if you like random statistics that really mean nothing then… hooray! Enjoy it for all it’s worth!

All graphs were courtesy of GraphJam.

If anybody wants to argue, comment, flame, add to any part of this post just sound off below.