I found the article kind of hard to parse. I <i>think</i> I ultimately got the point, but I'm going to share my struggles here in the hope that it will help the author. Then again, maybe it's just me who is completely ignorant of the WP7 ecosystem. I'm still interested though, because I find that lessons learned building for any platform, be it WP7, iOS, Android, Twitter, or Facebook, are often cross-applicable to another.<p>--<p>State your thesis early on and make sure it is clear. I <i>think</i> this is probably the closest thing to a thesis in the article, but I can't tell because the sentence is malformed:<p>While it is indeed possible to make money on WP7 creating a relatively high budget indie game (say anything over $500) will probably not pay good returns unless it has XBL support and marketting.<p>When using parentheses, the reader should be able to skip the information contained therein, and still read the sentence. If we remove the parenthetical information, we get:<p>"While it is indeed possible to make money on WP7 creating a relatively high budget indie game will probably not pay good returns unless it has XBL support and marketting."<p>I ended up assuming you meant:<p>"While it is indeed possible to make money on WP7 creating a relatively high budget indie game, your efforts will probably not pay good returns unless it has XBL support and marketting."<p>Or maybe it's this:<p>"While it is indeed possible to make money on WP7, creating a relatively high budget indie game will probably not pay good returns unless it has XBL support and marketting."<p>I didn't arrive at that last interpretation until I had written this entire post, then came back to proofread what I'd written. This really reenforces my last point: grammar and punctuation matters. I acknowledge that it could just be me as a poor reader. There may be plenty of people who can breeze through the article, but my ability to comprehend the writing was constantly interrupted by the inability to parse the phrasing of a sentence.<p>--<p>Provide context for your reader. With WP7 being so new, it is likely that the reader is not actively developing for WP7, but is considering doing so. Your advice is particularly well suited for them, but there are many points in the article where I wasn't clear about some distinctions:<p>"An XBL game released in any given week will have more exposure to market than a game that is #1 on a popular list."<p>"The fact of the matter is XBL games get much more exposure both in the market place and advertising of the device, they get even more exposure than the popular games lists."<p>I don't have any context for what constitutes an XBL game and a non-XBL game, so the contrast between a game released on XBL and one that is "#1 on a popular list" doesn't provide enough context. XBL seems obvious enough, but what's this popular list? Is it third-party. Is it somewhere on the phone?<p>It would be useful to preface these statements with a short paragraph outlining the choice you face as a developer: releasing a game on XBL vs releasing on your own.<p>--<p>Grammar and puncutation matters. Grammar and punctuation are like programming syntax. You wouldn't expect your compiler to interpret code that omits important syntactical elements, would you? The same applies to grammar. The reader is your compiler. I'm not the best writer, so when I do write, I try to step away from the piece for a day and re-read it with fresh eyes. What seemed clear to me on the day of writing reads like mud the following day.