Jeff Tunnell, co-founder of GarageGames, has posted a very in depth and interesting look at the numbers behind XBLA. While I won't go too in depth in it here the basics (as far as he could tell them without breaking NDA) were this:

• Marble Blast Ultra cost close to $300,000 to develop
• It sold approximately 120,000 copies
• At $10 USD a piece, it made approximately 1.2 million
• Developers get to keep between 30%-65%
• At 65% (his number not mine) they brought in approx. $780,000

He also mentioned that while MBU is considered one of the highest grossing XBLA titles, it would be considered a failure to some publicly traded studios who look for at least a 5x return on investment.

 

[UPDATE] It seems that I forgot to add the link. You can check it out here.

Hard OCP has a great interview with Mark Frohnmayer, President of GarageGames, where he discusses the possiblity of Map packs, Game type additions, and a bunch of other downloadable content. While no firm answers were given, and it was revealed that the shipped game cannot, without modification, handle extra maps, there were enough positive answers to believe we’ll be seeing something before there next game is out. My personal favorite question/answer was: Multiplayer Ultra map pack? Strong possibility in the near time frame. So head over and read the interview now

It’s a couple of weeks old news now, but it seems that Pat Willson, one of the developers for Marble Blast Ultra has had enough of IGN’s constant jabs at his game and has decided to let off a little steam on his Blog
Personally if the copy of the game they reviewed wasn’t the final copy then good on him for telling them off.