For the second year in a row, Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion has been a huge success.  Last year’s lineup of downloadable titles yielded two of the year’s best games in Braid and Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2, and boasted huge profits for Microsoft.  This year, we didn’t get quite as much AAA content, but Microsoft’s combination of 2.5D shooters, remade fighters, and physics-based motorcycle sims made for a huge summer for Microsoft, who reported 200% growth in revenue over last year's sales.

Leading the pack was Shadow Complex, which set a one-week record for downloads of a single-player game.  Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Trials HD also did extremely well, joining Shadow Complex as top five one-week sellers. Consider the fact that this year, Summer of Arcade titles cost more on average than they did last year, and you've got some huge revenues.

The games also did well critically; only Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled failed to achieve a Metacritic score of 80% or higher, and the games averaged an 80% overall.  It’s not quite as lofty an average as last year’s Summer lineup, which averaged almost 86%, but impressive nonetheless.

On a related note, Microsoft also same great success with their free-to-play online game show, 1 vs. 100.  According to MS, the game’s live show sessions averaged more than a half a million users, and nearly “three million” people have downloaded the game so far.