Potential huge news for fans of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Indie Game service this afternoon. As everybody knows by now the most popular and best selling game currently on the service is FortressCraft, the game that is constantly derided as being nothing more than a Minecraft-clone when, in fact, Minecraft is actually a clone of another game. Semantics… blah.

In any case, DJArcas, the primary developer of the game, popped on Twitter a few minutes ago to discuss sales of the game. In a sense, the game has sold very very well with 497,450 crafters taking the plunge for the Xbox indie title.

So let’s see… do a little math… at 240 MS points that’s $3. So multiple 3 x 497,450 and you get $1,492,350. Nice! But first let’s subtract Microsoft’s 30% cut. I’ll skip a bit here and just bring you the end result. If my math is correct (and why wouldn’t it be? I have a calculator!) the guys who made FortressCraft should be richer by about $1,044,545. Whew… millionaires by my count!

And then comes in this little tweet by the same guy:

And just so EVERYONE knows – I haven’t received a SINGLE cent of money from this game.(‘cept $80 in donations)

Wait… what? FortressCraft has been on Xbox Live Indie Games for how long and he is still waiting for his first payment? Is that correct? That’s certainly what it sounds like.

If true, and again this is coming from the developers’ Twitter account, then that would mean Microsoft is holding out a rather large sum from at least a single indie developer. Who knows if anybody else has yet to be paid.

We’re currently following up with the FortressCraft developers about this issue and will update once we have more, but until then it looks like these guys are getting stiffed pretty hard. For shame, Microsoft… for shame.

[FortressCraft]

Update: DJArcas has gotten back to me to confirm that Microsoft hasn’t sent him his money yet. He blames Microsoft’s current system which is overly complicated and unwieldly. He still has no idea when he’s getting paid but hopes it’ll be in mid November, but says it could also take as long as mid-February of next year.

I’ve reached out to do an interview so stay tuned for that.