14 DAY TRIAL // Epic Games and Chair have announced that Shadow Complex, a 2D Castlevania style videogame released over Xbox Live with no boxed copy, has managed to sell more than 200,000 units in its first week since it was outed on August 19, becoming the most downloaded single player-oriented game in the history of the Microsoft service.
Scott Austin, who is the director of digitally distributed games at Microsoft, has said that Shadow Complex is the “capstone title of the second annual Summer of Arcade program”.
The title is powered by the Unreal Engine but it's still mostly set in 2 dimensions, a choice explained by Donald Mostard from Chair by saying that “we come back to 2D partly because of nostalgia, but I also think that this design works so well with exploration, where you're kind of peeling back these onion layers of the game.”
Shadow Complex is unusual because of the high production values that went into it, which are probably partly responsible for the success of the game, alongside the simple yet engaging gameplay.
There seems to be a shift in thinking even about big companies such as Epic Games that, alongside the AAA projects that are set to be released in a box and serve as a platform for DLC and for expansions, there's also room to create smaller titles with a more limited yet stable audience that are only outed using Xbox Live, the PlayStation Network or the various PC services like Steam.
With the success of Shadow Complex, which has seen the involvement of author Orson Scott Card involved in writing the story, Chair will probably continue to create games for Xbox Live, hoping to break other records with its next release. Let's just hope that it opts to innovate again rather than creating Shadow Complex 2.