Developer of Battleheart and ZombieVille abandons Android

"> 2by Emily Aquin
tagged Android, apps, developers

The developer of the popular apps Battleheart and ZombieVille USA, Mika Mobile, has blogged that the cost of Android game development outweighs the profit their apps bring in. Both games are hits on iOS, and had been ported to Android to much excitement. Apparently, the Mika Mobile/Android marriage was not a good one, and the game developers will no longer support the game on Android.

Here, the developer explains their challenges with Android:

There’s a big difference between generating revenue, and “making money” – It’s not that they haven’t generated income, but that income is offset by the additional support costs the platform has demanded. Where did your dollar go? We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another – porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc.  I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn’t go through.  We spent thousands on various test hardware.  These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android.  Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink.  Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.

This begs the question: is Android shooting itself in the foot by needing support for so many different devices? Will this fragmentation issue lead to other developers leaving Android? While the open system of Android has its challenges, it is also the most popular operating system, accounting for 48.6% of all smartphone subscribers.

I suspect the future of Android will require compromise from both the developers and Google. Android developers will have to use different tactics in creating apps than they would for iOS, not just porting over a popular app and expecting it to thrive. Google, though, also has to strive to make the Google Play store a viable place for developers to make money and continue to innovate. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

source: Mika Mobile
via: Mobile Syrup

» See more articles by Emily Aquin

Categorized as Android Applications, Android Development

Comments Richard Bown

Sounds like someone’s complaining about having to provide customer service and technical support! So what? There are plenty of great games on android whose developers CAN be bothered producing games for the largest market share. Looks like I’ll be spending money with them instead.

Finn

Read it more carefully. Android development pulls in about 10% of iOS right now; the average spend per customer on Android is about 1/50. And Eric Chu, who was tryIng to fix this for Google, has just left. All is not happy at Mountain View.

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