'Monday Night Combat' tops August's Xbox Live Arcade chart

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With good reviews and a word-of-mouth buzz quickly dismissing speculation that Monday Night Combat was a derivative knock-off based on Valve's popular Team Fortress 2, the most recent analysis from Gamerbytes shows that Monday Night Combat accumulated around 172,000 sales to top August's chart of Xbox Live Arcade titles.

Monday Night Combat refers to a fictional game show in which contestants face off against wave after wave of robotic opponents. There are six different constestant types to choose from and the two initial gametypes provided enough variety to earn high ratings across the board.

It uses a third-person perspective (like Grand Theft Auto IV, Gears of War or Red Faction: Armageddon) and sets it within the usually bird's-eye view Tower Defense genre ( Plants vs Zombies, Cursed Treasure, Fieldrunners) but Monday Night Combat doesn't stop there, adding online multiplayer into the mix for frantic 6-vs-6 battles.

Atmospheric platform game Limbo topped the chart upon its release in July with 244,287 new players, and in August slips to second with a still impressive 127,510 extra downloads.

Prior to that it had won awards for Excellence in Visual Art and Technical Excellence at the 2010 Independent Games Festival in March, thanks to an immersive monochrome art style and clever puzzle elements.

Despite debuting at a premium price of $15 / €14, it bucked trends for longevity and multiplayer action: the game's length clocked in at around five hours. Rather than brimming with social networking features, it remains a steadfastly solitary singleplayer experience as players lead a lost boy on a rescue mission.

Gamerbytes's rankings are compiled using leaderboard data for each game, which are used to derive approximate numbers of new players on a weekly and monthly basis. The chart below combines entries from the August Leaderboard Statistics with Gamerbytes's data on players of the month's new releases.

Limbo's 127,510 new players brought its leaderboard total to 371,797, meaning that in just six weeks it passed 2009's success story 'Splosion Man and 2008's award-winning Braid.

Xbox Live Arcade sales chart - August 2010
1) Monday Night Combat (171,991 new players)
2) Limbo (127,510)
3) Castlevania HD (75,101)
4) Scott Pilgrim (71,560)
5) Lara Croft & the Guardian of Light (67,231)
6) Castle Crashers (53,565)
7) Hydro Thunder (52,814)
8) UNO (27,301)
9) Risk: Factions (20,126)
10) Blacklight: Tango Down (16,100)

For a more in-depth analysis, see Gamerbytes.com.