Monaco struggled with sales on XBLA

Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine developer Andy Schatz opened up about the game's Xbox Live Arcade release in a recent Reddit thread, explaining that the delay from April 24 to May 10 caused sales to plummet. The title released on PC in April as planned.

"There was a bug that only occurred on the retail boxes, so we couldn't have caught it until the game was fully through the certification process (four-player games were disconnecting, pretty much every game)," said Schatz. "Even when we were submitting a patch for it, we were blind since we couldn't actually test to reproduce the problem on the dev kits."

Schatz went on to say he was disappointed in the version's sales performance, especially since the team put so much effort into the port.

"OTOH, I don't think the demo was particularly strong … so it could be that the game wouldn't have done better on Xbox even if it had a simultaneous launch (though IMO it would have performed at least twice as well)," he said. "We had to submit two patches, and luckily they had already relaxed the charges for that process about a month prior."

Unlike other indie developers who released titles on XBLA, Schatz refrained from bashing Microsoft, saying, "As for Microsoft's treatment of us through the process … well we had a publisher (Majesco) that buffered us from them. I don't really feel like it's a good idea to piss in the pool, so whatever complaints I have I think it's best that I keep them between me, Majesco, and Microsoft."

Schatz confirmed that a Linux port is on the way. "It's definitely happening," he said. The developer is also adding new alternative characters to the game, including one for the Redhead.

"The concept is that guards are distracted by her beauty and won't attack her until they get close enough to touch her; then they go into attack mode," he said. "This means that she can kit a bunch of dudes around to distract. Still working on balancing her, but she has a fun Pac-Man like feel."

Monaco challenges players to cooperate to pull off a heist using different specialized characters, such as the Locksmith and Pickpocket.

Source: Game Informer