Mika Mobile on selling Battleheart on iOS and Android | Hacker News Reader

Mika Mobile on selling Battleheart on iOS and Android

mikamobile.blogspot.com

56 pointsraptrex18 comments

Thanks for sharing this. As an iOS developer considering moving to Android I found the recount of your Android experience interesting.

You should look into Tapjoy. They are offering money for developers porting from Android to iPhone

The most surprising fact was that Android is 80% of iOS revenue - that's a LOT better than I would have expected and had previously thought about the android market.

Unless you compare launch months, in which case the Android revenue was 5% of iOS.

But then again his third caveat on those numbers is that the iOS version was heavily promoted during and after launch, while the Android version wasn't.

I find the tone of this article very strange. It starts off as a very positive "Hey, Android's worth doing". But by the end, you feel like he's being driven mad due to the added frustrations. :)

I dunno what's strange about it: "yes but needs improvement at a/b/c" is a pretty common result.

I'd seen the game before but had passed on it. I liked the developer's attitude and openness and so I just bought it.

It wasn't subtle.

"There are days where I just want to pull the plug on the whole thing because I'm sick of 12 year olds (or people with comparable communication skills) trying to convince me they've been wronged and I should give them their 3 dollars back.

...I shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. It is a loud, obnoxious baby though."

a loud, obnoxious baby

Which is, btw, one of the best characterizations of the Android ecosystem that I have read in a while.

I hope it will be taught some manners in the coming years.

I too find it strange. He says it was worth his time porting to Android but never says how long it took. I have this game on iOS and it came out quite a while ago.

What we really need to know is (profit)/(development time). And you'd have to match this on Android (or maybe surpass it given his frustration). Even if this took a reasonable time to port, it might be possible that had he worked on his next iOS game, he would have made even more money for his time.

He wrote that since they use Unity porting the game took him about a day and he also wrote the Android version is a meaningful source of revenue.

> Actually porting the game only took about a day.

It says how long it took, right there in the article. He says that he had to fight some trouble down the road, but 'porting' was done after a day, due to Unity magic.

Ah, totally missed that. So part of the moral is Unity is worth it.

Unity for Android is an extra $400 license once you've bought Unity for iPhone Pro. https://store.unity3d.com/shop/

>> What we really need to know is (profit)/(development time).

Don't forget the extra support time he had on Android. I don't know about you, but I want a high hourly pay to do that.

It seems like you can have the best of both worlds if you hire someone to take care of the support issues for you. The primary developer of a game as successful as Battleheart should not be wasting his time manually issuing refunds for users.

But that's less profit specifically for a platform that is already lower revenue.

Honestly, this was pretty all over the place and seems more like a stream of consciousness than any sort of proper comparison between the two markets. Sounds like he's been getting annoyed by support requests lately and decided to write a rant ("comparison") about his Android market experience.

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