Monaco XBLA

Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine has been purchased more than half a million times, developer Pocketwatch Games revealed on Twitter earlier today. Unfortunately for Microsoft and fans of indie games on Xbox platforms, a paltry 36,000 of those sales took place on Xbox Live Arcade, with the remainder coming from the PC, Mac and Linux versions of Monaco.

The multiplayer stealth-action title was first released on PC in April of last year; an Xbox 360 release followed in May after a delay resulting from a bug that popped up during the Microsoft certification process pushed back the console version. The game’s PC, Mac and Linux versions were able to achieve sales to date of approximately 484,000 at least in part do to its inclusion in various Steam sales and its recent appearance as the bonus game in the Humble Indie Bundle 11.

The latest Humble Indie Bundle has been purchased over 296,000 times as of this writing, but not everyone who purchases the bundle receives a copy of Monaco. Buyers are able to name their own price for the pack of games and only receive Pocketwatch’s title if they pay higher than the average purchase price (currently sitting at $4.51). The developer initially tweeted that only “about half” of Humble Indie Bundle 11 buyers unlocked its game. Later it responded to an XBLA Fans query over Twitter to explain how it came to that estimation.

“It’s a guess,” Pocketwatch tweeted. “I can see how many steam keys have been activated, then I inflate that a little for those who dont steam [sic].”

Even ignoring its boost in sales from the bundle, there’s no question that Monaco has been a success on PC, Mac and Linux. Earlier this year, however, Pocket Watch’s Andy Shatz stated just the opposite of the game’s XBLA performance.

“I was never depending on the Xbox being our primary revenue generator, but I was very disappointed in Xbox sales nonetheless,” Schatz said on Reddit last July. “We put a ton of effort porting the game, and to have that effort be largely wasted was really disappointing.” The extreme disparity between his game’s latest console and computer sales figures would seem to justify his disappointment.

Source: @PocketwatchG