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
...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...
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.
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...