While most downloadable titles don’t get any promotion as prominent as a television campaign, there are still meaningful ways that the games can be shown off, like on the Xbox Live dashboard. Given that, Team Meat’s rather upset attitude about not getting their release week exclusively to their Super Meat Boy (they shared it with Double Fine’s Costume Quest) and not getting the top slot in the Spotlight feed as promised, can be understood.
“I was like ‘What’s the deal Are you guys pulling out Where’s our stuff ‘,” said Team Meat co-CEO Tommy Refenes. “It finally went up half way through our launch day. It was the number four spot; it wasn’t number one. The ‘spooktacular sale’, which was a whole bunch of other games that already came out that was the number one slot. An ad for a Mazda 3 was the number two slot because you all go on Xbox to figure out what car you want, right? We were number four and we stayed number four the entire week.
Apparently, Microsoft had promised Team Meat that the better that the title did, the more promotion it would receive. Despite outselling other contemporary games, further marketing did not materialize.
“We just kind of got pushed to the side, and that’s basically how the Xbox Live launch went. The only reason the game sold well was because of how we promoted it. The help from Microsoft was there in a very limited capacity,” Refenes insisted. “It’s not supposed to hurt your feelings because it’s business, but it totally f**king hurt my feelings. Me and Ed just killed ourselves trying to get this game done and now we’re just pushed to the side.
It was a f****** mindf***,” added the other half of Team Meat, Edmund McMillen. “It was really confusing. At that point I think we were so f***** up in our heads from development, it almost felt like ‘are these people out to get us? What’s happening here? Did we do something wrong? Are they trying to screw us because we did something wrong? ‘”
Source: Eurogamer
