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."

Comments

Sorry to be frank but what did he think

[PopAndGame]

He took a business risk trying to port the game to Windows RT and lost? Now he's crying about it? Great, yeah, it costs money to port things to new platforms. But that's why you do your research first! Hell, I'm not going around yelling how my non-existing game on Steam is selling bad!

But I know a thing or two about business and this is exactly why you research and don't cry about failed business decisions.

Re:Sorry to be frank but what did he think

[Alphadecay27]

To be fair to Windows RT, it's sold through an excessively limited distributed channel (Microsoft kiosks and Microsoft Stores). To then expect overnight miracles for a game that, admittedly, I have never heard of is a little astounding. Granted, 52 pounds is probably a bit of a shock, but having never heard of it (as an admitted iPad and Surface owner), I can't really say I am stunned.

This game sells 100k+ copies/day at $3 a piece on android. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubicon.dev.gbwg&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5ydWJpY29uLmRldi5nYndnIl0. It peaked at 500k/day within the past 30 days. Even if it had a massive refund rate (which it likely doesn't with a 4.5/5 rating) it probably made over a million dollars on other platforms within the same time frame. We're not talking about a tetris clone someone knocked out over the weekend from their mom's basement.

It appears that he expected it be promoted by Microsoft because of their 10,000 pound investment, even though his company apparently refused to recompile and support x86, which sounds like an obvious no brainer. I cannot imagine that a game like theirs has many ARM-specific code blocks, and if it does, then I fully expect they are easily swappable for something in x86-land (if not just the high level language equivalent that would run faster on x86).

They expected Microsoft to promote it because it is really popular game that has sold over 2.5 million copies on other platforms. They didn't "refuse" to port to x86. From his blog comments, it seems they have contractual obligations to not publish on x86 because they have a publisher (Viacom) that limits their ability to release on x86 since there is a PC version (through steam).

Re:You idiots

[Jesse_vd]

You know, I'd always heard that too. I've been an iOS user since the iPhone 3G so I've bought my share of apps there and have a good feel for mobile app pricing. I was pretty surprised by the prices in the Google Play store when I bought a Nexus 7 last week. Often things I'd expect to pay $.99-$1.99 for in the App Store are $5-7.

I wonder if this is a new trend? Are they compensating for lower sales, or has the Android market changed recently?

Re:Porting to Windows RT

[cbhacking]

What I don't get is the existence of an ARM-only app at all. What idiocy could lead somebody to intentionally exclude a large number of users, users who have more powerful hardware at that, to save the cost of changing one drop-down menu in Visual Studio and hitting Build again? On the face of it, that seems completely asinine. Unless the guy was using assembly or something else stupid like counting on pointers being 32 bits (which would *still* work in an x86 app, just not x64 native), porting to x86 should have been trivial.