Xbox Live Community Game Developers are doing it for themselves.

 
With the exception of a few hits XBLCG sales have got off to a slow start, there has been a lot of talk on the XNA Forums as to why this is. One of the major reasons is that Microsoft as of yet has not made any effort to grow awareness of the service.
Anyone who plays Community Games knows that not all of the games/applications are up to scratch, but there are definitely enough quality games on the service for it to deserve your attention. So it’s great to see that the Developers have started to take things into their own hands and are coming up with some ingenious ways of spreading the word about their games.

Here are some examples:

Murudai, made a flash game of his hit title Solar before it was released on the Xbox.

Xonatron have done a great job spreading the news on their upcoming game Duality:ZF using Youtube and Facebook, hopefully this will lead to some good sales for the game.

Tell a Friend used to be a great feature on the Xbox Dashboard, but was removed with the NXE update, but a few of the more inventive developers have found a way to add it into their games, Hexothermic and Awesome Tank use this feature. It’s a great way of letting your friends know about an XBLCG and we should see Tell a Friend being used by many more developers in the future.

Running Pixel have started using in game advertising to try and create awareness of their games, hopefully they will add the Tell a Friend feature to the adverts.

Bill Reiss has added his game Dr Popper to a new website that let’s you play games free online- http://www.silverarcade.com. This is a service that is proving very popular already and could prove to be great advertising for XBLCG. If you want to get your game in this service check out this link- https://xboxhornet.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/play-xbox-live-community-games-on-the-web

One of the newest sites, yet already one of the most comprehensive dealing with Community Games is http://xblcg.info. It a great site developed by Nick Gravelyn, it has all the XBLCG listed and a plethora of search options to help you find the game you want. Each game entry has links to the Xbox Market Place, xnPlay review site and it’s Xbox Forum page. We have also been promised user ratings for the games in the future. This will be a great tool for potential purchases to be able to see at a glance, which are the better XBLCG.

I am sure there are lots of other ways developers are trying to spread the word for their games. If you know of any, please let us know.