Right at the tail end of GDC, Microsoft released to developers the XNA Community Games sales figures. While many of the top sellers are keeping their data private (including Miner Dig Deep and the Masseuse products), many have released their data to Gamasutra, which has a very nice in depth discussion. The general consensus? Most developers are disappointed.
Now before I get into defending Microsoft and the XNA platform as a whole, let me say that the release of sales figures after GDC was certainly not a mistake. If sales had been going well, Microsoft would have done everything in its power to get those figures out either before or during GDC in order to bolster more developer support for the platform. As it is, they knew most developers would be disappointed with the figures, and thus waited until after GDC when the news would have the smallest impact. PR guys are smart like that. So trust me, Microsoft knew you'd be sad and is trying to cover up its mistakes on the platform.
Now I'm going to play the devil's advocate against the indies here (who I respect greatly), and just say that I think Microsoft is getting a bad wrap for poor sales figures. Most of the articles I'm seeing are about how Microsoft isn't promoting the platform, and how Microsoft isn't promoting their games, how Community Games are hard to find on the NXE (TRUE!!! I complained about this already!). No one's blaming themselves for the lack of good games on the system, which is relegating it to second class citizenship. No one is complaining about their own lack of marketing. In fact, some of the games that have pretty good sales figures (not great) are marketing themselves, and are seeing profits as a result. You can't expect Microsoft to do all of this for you, just because you're on their service that they provide you mostly for free. That said, even those with good marketing (like Weapon of Choice) aren't doing great, but at least it doesn't look like they're blaming Microsoft at all. They're just disappointed.
Of course, many are taking this opportunity to talk about how much better iPhone would be to develop for, but I can't stand these comparisons, mostly because the type of game that is going to sell well on the iPhone is going to be different from one that is going to sell well on a console. iPhone is all about the impulse buy. $1 for some small app that looks fun that I want to play right now because I'm bored on a bus, or that serves a need I have right now, but may never have in the future. If that's the game (or app) you're developing, you need to be on iPhone because your game isn't going to sell well on XBLCG anyway. Console sales just are not going to work that way, and you shouldn't expect them to. The amount of money, time, and polish that needs to go in to something that will be sold on a console is higher (IMO) than something sold on a mobile platform because it needs to capture the user's attention for longer. On iPhone you develop for a short attention span, and on XBLCG, you need to develop for the longer attention span. It's just necessary.
Lastly, I want to reiterate how Microsoft and Apple are the only people that are providing an open platform for development, and should be lauded for that alone. It seems both companies thought of the idea at the same time. The 1.0 refresh of XNA was released in April of 2007, a full year ahead of the iPhone SDK, and Microsoft announced Community games in February of 2008, a month ahead of Apple's SDK announcement (which included their app store announcement). However, Apple shipped first and with more features (including sales figures) starting in March of 2008, whereas the NXE (which included the CG store) launched in November of 2008, and didn't get sales figures until last week. In general, both companies deserve kudos for opening previously closed development platforms, and for giving the average person the opportunity to make money on the platforms, but when it comes down to it, they're still very different platforms with different concerns, and attempting to compare them (in my mind) is absolutely ludicrous, so much so that I won't even talk about the millions of features Microsoft HAS to offer in order to keep up with their own XDK technologies (including parental control) that Apple hasn't even touched on yet.
Really lastly, I have ideas on what really needs to happen for CG to really be a "quit your job" platform, but that will have to wait for another post.