Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
This story certainly doesn't seem new to anyone who follows the development of indie games, especially WRT the Xbox360. Microsoft has a history of deprioritizing indie games in general, making it difficult to get promotion for titles without large publishers, and general indifference to a healthy developer ecosystem.
No surprise, then, when mobile games suffer the same fate. They seem to think that they can just copy the worst parts of Apple's model and it will just flourish...
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
It seems Rubicon's beef was the lack of promotion by Microsoft of their title. Is this promotion Rubicon pays for or is this an expectation that their app would be freely promoted for them?
Is an app's success due in large part to the operator of the app store promoting said app? That seems like a system ripe for bribery.
Wow, it's such a good thing Microsoft put all their eggs in one basket and made the desktop OS look identical to their tablet. Now if the tablet falls flat (well, it did), that will make even less sense than it did when people were beta testing and screaming about how stupid it is.
...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".
He should be happy with his 95% market penetration...
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
if Microsoft wants Surface to have any chance of success they need to start writing checks to the top devs to port their games/apps to RT. otherwise there is no financial incentive since the sales will probably not pay for the costs to port and test the apps
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.
Gamers on Windows are used to having a trial version. Honestly, if there isn't a trial version I just pass right over it. I've been burned by shitty apps time and time again, I won't risk the money just to find out it's terrible. I've certainly bought plenty of games after playing the trial version, so perhaps they'd see some more sales if they added that feature.
They should also think about porting to Windows 8.... no idea why the limited their app to only Windows RT, as the market share is so small right now.
He is mad about this?
To get that much money every WindowsRT user must have bought it.
Microsoft is selling tablets and phones that won't run traditional Windows apps, and can only run Windows RT apps. Microsoft is encouraging developers to make RT the standard for future Windows development, but for some reason they aren't willing to promote RT apps?
Here is the problem. Most people have an Android or iOS device today. If there Android and iOS apps you really love, you probably already purchased them for those platforms (and perhaps for both if you jumped ship at some point).
How many people are jumping at the bit to buy them again for another platform?
What Microsoft really needs is killer new apps that take advantage of Windows in a unique way that aren't on Android or iOS. And I just don't see that happening. Windows RT is dead on arrival for a number of reasons (can't join a domain, can't run legacy Windows apps and doesn't offer anything new for future development).
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
"Anyone who caught my previous post might already know that we recently released Great Big War Game onto Windows RT. If you're one of the teeny tiny crowd of people who just bought one of these devices, you can find one of the very small number of âoeproperâ games right here: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/great-big-war-game/30f26b23-aa92-4fed-9273-099de3069616
A week after release we have made the princely sum of £52 in sales. That's not a typo. And despite this, and the fact that GBWG is one of only several halfway decent launch titles, Microsoft have confirmed they will not give us any promotional features or help us with visibility in any way.
If you're familiar with their new store, this means our app is forever consigned to the garbage bin, presumably earning us less than £52 a week in future. Even if that rate is sustained, it will take just under two years before we recoup the salary paid to the guy who did the port.
Apple regularly promote our apps. Android regularly promote our apps. Even RIM (Blackberry) regularly promote our apps. We enjoy working with those companies and it's nice to see them acknowledge that we bring them some small amount of additional value to their setup. Firms our size need a bit of a leg up, and we go out of our way to show our gratitude to the above for helping us out in this way from time to time.
Microsoft on the other hand clearly do not value us at all. Even whilst there's almost nothing to promote, they will not feature our title for bizarre admin reasons. And this is whilst their store is empty and they need developers like us to fill their store far more than developers like us need them to pay us £50 a week.
Needless to say we will not be working with Microsoft again to bring any of our titles, old or new, to this platform. A snub is never a nice thing to receive, but when it's from someone who needs you more than you need them, it's doubly insulting. And it's not like we're cutting off our nose to spite our face - even small indies can live without an additional £52 a week.
If other developers get this treatment, that store is going to look might bleak for a long time to come. Please take this as a warning. I know I sound bitter and twisted and there's a reason for that - I actually am. We have wasted a lot of time, resources and money on supporting this platform and all that happened was we got spat on.
If you're not familiar with Great Big War Game, here's some reviews. Not many indie titles get accolades like this: http://www.rubicondev.com/gbwg/reviews.php and certainly none that you'd expect a major platform holder to shun.
I hope this thing falls flat on it's face, but I do hope they don't take other developers down with them. We are fortunate enough to able to suck up the £6,000 it cost to do this port and move on, but other outfits may well not. Don't be one of them.
Here's my usual picture to end on.
http://www.rubicondev.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/bgifdhad.jpg"
I must be doing something wrong or missed a very important memo. I find it hard enough to get people using my open source software let alone paying for it, and this guy is clearly under the impression he is entitled to a steady instantly large flow of income from his first platform release.
http://interserver.net/
By all accounts, people don't seem to buy Windows RT tablets at all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
anyone been able to crack the admin pwd yet?
AccountKiller
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.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
10,000 pounds for development is low. That's like what 3 guys for a month? Art (sound/graphics) assets get reused. If it was a brand new property, you're looking at a much larger figure than that for anything beyond Tiny Wings. Even if you did it all yourself, how much "paid" did you miss out on? Just because you didn't pay yourself doesn't mean that's not a dev cost.
£10,000 is actually pretty reasonable. Assuming he's got... say... two programmers on staff, and they're good enough to demand industry standard wages? That's about 1-2 months of development and debugging, plus the costs of dev kits, testers, and software licenses.
As near as I can tell, the big issue is that RT can't run the object oriented code favored by Android and iOS. Result is that large portions of any program would have to be completely refactored instead of simply converted and debugged.
is fail.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."