Gamasutra have published their Xbox Live Arcade sales analysis for October. The runaway success for October was unsurprisingly Happy Wars, XBLA’s first “free-to-play” game with over 760K downloads in its first month of release. Of course we don’t know how much money was actually made via the game’s micro-transactions, though Gamasutra did note that Happy Wars was listed as the 11th most played game on Major Nelson’s activity chart on its second week of release. The only other game to achieve success was Sonic Adventure 2 with around 56K downloads in October. Conversely Sega’s other vintage release, NIGHTS into Dreams, only managed 5K downloads over the same period.

Serious Sam BFE and Zombie Driver HD were also released this month but didn’t sell particularly well either with 7K and 5K in downloads, respectively. It was also noted that the DLC add-on for Serious Sam BFE, which cost the same price as the full game, only showed 245 gamers as having played the new levels. However, Gamasutra did point out that this was not an accurate representation of actual sales. Worms Revolution, Naughty Bear Panic in Paradise and Guilty Gear XXACP also launched in October but did not have leaderboards that Gamasutra could follow.

Two Kinect games were also released on XBLA, the US-only Intel Discovered, which despite being free only managed around 5K downloads and Homerun Stars, which is also the first game to utilise SmartGlass, performed poorly with an embarrassingly low 231 downloads. It’s beginning to look like the Kinect bubble may be well and truly burst on XBLA. For a quick look at what games are due out next month, take a peek at our new Calendar Update feature.

Source: Gamasutra