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Hit Game Makes £52 In First Week On Windows RT
Barence writes "Great Big War Game, a popular iOS and Android app, made only £52 in its first week on Windows RT. In an angry blog post titled 'Windows RT — Born to fail,' UK-based developer Rubicon blamed Microsoft for the paltry sum and said it won't be bringing any more of its titles to the fledgling platform. It seems Microsoft refused to promote the app as it would only run on Windows RT devices. However, Microsoft quickly got in touch with Rubicon, and the post was deleted and replaced with an apologetic response saying, 'Microsoft have graciously decided work with us to iron out the problems and get us past this incident.' Rubicon will be hoping that £52 figure improves quickly, as it spent £10,000 porting the game to Windows RT."
Sometimes you want to dive in, be first, and maybe get a huge portion of the market's mindshare.
Fortunately for the rest of us, we can now review his experiences when doing our research. So the rest of us can be more cautious. Likely, though, the rest of us won't get Microsoft's dedicated attention to our game as he is getting now.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
You ported your game to a new platform, out for a month on a single high end high price tablet, and you are shocked that you didn't sell as many copies as the Android version. There are hundreds of millions of Android devices out there, with a couple of million more being added every day.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
...that nobody wants to pay for his game.
Okay, so, £52 in the first week? That's about $83. That's roughly $12/day. In the first week. On a brand new platform.
What the fuck was this guy thinking? That when he hit the magic "Submit" button on the developers portal for the MS App Store, money would start raining down from the ceiling? Did he think scantily clad women would arrive on his doorstep within minutes to personally "massage" him in a hot tub full of champagne?
The title might as well read, "Developer Underwhelmed by Product Success, Blames Everyone Else".
Why blame the platform?
There was a commercial (I have no idea what it was for anymore) of an interview with a hypothetical sports star after a bad game. My poor memory of the dialog follows. ..." (it went on for a while)
"That was a rough game, what do you think lead to the loss?"
"Well, I've learned that after a failure, it's always best to look inward first."
"The great ones always do."
"But since I know I'm not at fault, I blame the other players, the coach, the refs, the fans,
An RT only version means that you're targeting a tiny portion of the user base. That's what, Surface RT users only? Not a lot of surprise that it failed given that target market.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Also, it is for a game that has already been on sale for awhile, thus many have already played it and aren't interested in re-buying it.
If they think there'll be massive sales on a new platform, well they are dumb. If they think there'll be massive sales on a new platform of a game that is old, they are doubly dumb.
Either their marketing and sales department is just dumb OR the software development divisions have so much internal clout that they don't have to listen. I'm betting on the latter.
You want your platform to succeed? You need apps. You want a lot of apps quickly, you'd better make it EASY EASY EASY to port existing apps from other popular platforms to your new platform. Preferably, with one click. Another solution would be a near perfect OS emulator. However you do it, you have to do it.
The Fuck You development culture of Microsoft says "No. Go recode and don't bother me with your problems. You're just an ISV after all. The only people we care about are large business customers." The other obvious characteristic that's becoming obvious is the assumption of success. MS obviously has no plan B. No backup to boost sales or make the platform desirable. It's "We're Microsoft. Here it is. Take it or leave it."
Frankly, I don't see how Microsoft is going to last another 10 years this way.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Microsoft's most recent problems have been execution. The company by many aspects is too slow and bureaucratic.
The Zune is a good example. The iPod came out in 2001. Many here thought it would fail but it didn't. As early as 2003 MS was working on a competing product; however, Jim Allchin called their own product "terrible". It would take MS another 3 years to get a product to consumers. At the time, the Zune was probably the best MP3 player out there (questionable color choices aside). The marketing was horrible; the PC software was buggy. But more importantly, MS failed to realize that the market wasn't in MP3 players anymore. Apple came out with the iPod Touch which was a portable computing device that functioned as a PDA/browser/MP3 player/whatever. The Zune never caught up.
The Kin was another example. When MS bought Danger, the plan was to release a new phone in six months. It took 18 months and when released the phone was buggy and lacked a market. Insiders say many internal decisions doomed the effort. The Sidekicks used Java as the primary language, but being a MS product, that would not be allowed. The product team had to replace the entire OS with Windows CE. That decision alone would doom the six month deadline. There were two internal mobile teams and the Windows CE team refused to help the Danger team as they wanted to kill the project.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I have some bad news for you kiddo, you might want to sit down for this, the casual gamers are now a market bigger than what you think of as gamers. They are todays gamers, welcome to 2012.
Also most PC games these days play fine on a middle of the road PC with a $100 video card. Even most of the fairly hardcore shooter games.
Well anybody who couldn't look at the painfully pathetic WinRT numbers and realize it would be best to wait and see if it gains momentum or turns into another Megaflop like WinPhone 7 (I'm betting the later myself) frankly deserves to lose money, because it is foolish to spend 10,000 pounds to port something for such a small userbase whom you don't even know are gonna be willing to buy apps or not!
We are talking about a company with a history of mobile flops, trying to force their flagship OS onto a platform where the majority of their software won't run, and on top of that they are charging iPad money for the thing...who couldn't smell the stench of fail from a mile away? Did this guy do the same retarded move for the Playbook and the Touchpad? No? Then why in the hell did he think that the same stupid move that didn't work for two huge corps like RIM and HP would magically work just because MSFT stuck their name on it? Especially after seeing the horrible numbers WinPhone 7 put up?
I'm sorry but this dumbass deserves to lose money, he picked a widely panned OS from a company with a history of mobile failure and then whined because surprise! Selling an app on a flop platform don't make money. Well no shit next you'll be telling me those guys that spent lots of money porting to the Touchpad and Playbook didn't break even. If this isn't a double facepalm moment I don't know what is, one facepalm simply isn't enough.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Casual games are the biggest market in the same sense that Lego is the biggest tire manufacturer. Based on some quick googling, it looks like the casual game industry has revenues of about $3 billion, versus $78 billion for the video game industry as a whole.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
He whined, so MS would take notice and help him off-set his loss. Not the most ethical of practices, but seems to have worked.