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Comment by dreyfiz | Hacker News Reader

Did you see this part at the end, and if so, does that affect your judgement?

> A final thought, regarding Android’s relative weakness as a software platform. iOS’s exclusivity for a bunch of big-name mobile games — Need for Speed Undercover, Star Wars: Battle for Hoth, Monopoly, Tetris, The Sims, Assassin’s Creed — has been broken. Not by Android, where none of these games exist, but by Windows Phone 7, a one-month-old platform.

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Microsoft has a lot of weight in the game market. Not surprising that they convinced some people to get onboard. I doubt very much that, as Gruber seems to be implying, there is something intrinsically flawed about the Android platform that is a barrier to game development.

EDIT: Unity will likely make a big difference to the Android appsphere: http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/android

They "convinced" developers to get on board in large part because they let devs use the same tools they've been using to create the original games on Windows with. If I had an existing PC game it's a no brainer to target WP7. Android is a much tougher sell.

They also paid for a lot of these ports. Many iPhone devs have mentioned Microsoft approaching them with money and help to get them to port to phone7.

Windows paid for all these companies to create the games. They funded the development - that's the only reason why.

So, why doesn't Google fund those same players? There must be a value judgement there because I gotta assume Google thought of that as an option.

Why incentive do they have to do this? Android has surpassed the iPhone in numbers--it's just a matter of time before developers switch to building Android first, then iOS.

Has it passed in terms of sales per unit time, or total sales to date? I think it's the former, whereas the latter matters more to someone selling apps.

Symbian has more units than iPhone but the iPhone has more apps.

Number does not equal app sales.

Microsoft had to do this since they are that far behind in the game. They probably blew billions to do this and not to mention, this is not a sustainable strategy. Google, on the other hand, should probably improve their NDK, which a number of changes are coming, to attract developers that way.

@Tichy has asked in the below comments,

> where are the killer games for OS X?

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