Gameloft scaling back Android development in favor of iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Gameloft scaling back Android development in favor of iPhone

reuters.com

26 pointsrauljara8 comments

"We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android," Rochefort said.

Unsurprising, as I just checked the android market and their site, and couldn't actually find any of their games for sale! No product results in no revenue. Now, maybe there are good reasons they're not shipping on Android, and an article about that would be really interesting to read. But this article is just a hit piece, sorry.

Oh please, this is just Gameloft whining and hoping others drop out so that they have less competition. They've successfully run in the extremely fragmented cell phone game market long before the iPhone came out. Android is, at worst, the same thing they've already been doing. If they ignore Android someone else will come along and eat their lunch with their own business model.

Not surprising. The cost of developing for the Android platform is rising: (Multiple screen resolutions, buggy SDK implementations) and the money to be made in this area isn't rising to match. As the platform fragments more (it will) revenue (or people willing to pay for applications) has to rise as well or more than just Gameloft is going to exit the android marketplace.

Android sales are almost certainly increasing faster than development cost, so I doubt that's the issue.

The likely reason is that Android doesn't yet have the critical mass behind it to make development profitable and Gameloft overestimated the speed of adoption to begin with. If enough Android handsets were out there, I think the criticism over the Marketplace and handset inconsistencies would be secondary to profit.

The Android platform is new and it has it kinks alot of factors will play a role in its development such as how many phones are sold. It is harder to develop for the android there is no standardization within the carrier's versions firmware.Apple is closed and have there updates in order and they should and they have one source to update itunes. Until the Android OS gets older and works out its kinks it will attract more developers. Especially with Apple hanging around I have an iphone and I like the Droid might possibly get one since ATT is iphones only carrier #fail. #more customers for the Droid ATT u sux

Excellent timing. It sure appears that Android has hit its tipping point (I have family members who are now proud owners of Android phones). Now is definitely the time to scale things back.

Google did make some improvements to the market in 1.6, so I'm hoping that effort is ongoing. Really frustrating how secretive they are about everything though.

Maybe I'm blind but I didn't find any of their games in the market...anyone else?

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