Zeboyd Games has just announced that they’ve made more money from their games Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII on Steam in five days than a year + on the Xbox Live Indie Game Service.

I don’t want to jump to the immediate conclusion from this that the PC and Steam are simply better for indie developers than Xbox Live.  There could be a lot of factors at work here; for one, the receptiveness of Xbox vs. PC gamers to RPGs, especially retro ones.  Or maybe it’s just, you know, the power of Steam.  It’s become something of a sales juggernaut over the years.  People get genuinely weird about buying games during the sales, games are bought with no intention of playing them because they are such great deals, etc.

But that 5 days > 1 year profit is still a hell of a compelling statistic.  It raises the question, what is Steam doing right exactly, and can this be applied to consoles?  If Microsoft and/or Sony can get this magic formula, it could mean a lot more success for their companies and indie developers.

Or, Valve could just extend it’s Cthulhu-like tentacles and embrace the entire gaming world.  Put a version of Steam on all consoles, all connected to one Valve account.  It’s not implausible, look at the Steam integration in the PS3 version of Portal 2.

[Source: Zeboyd Games website . ]