Game Developer magazine: 8.8% surveyed making games for WP
Game Developer magazine released their data from a survey on mobile game development.
I didn’t quite catch the sample size, but it’s of no surprise that coming out on top at 94.6% is iOS, followed not so far behind with 70.7% by Android.
What is a surprise is that the smallest userbase, WP7 comes in at third. A long way away at 8.8%. But that is still more than BB, Symbian and Bada combined.
Blackberry is fourth at 2.7% followed by Symbian at 2% and at the very back is Bada at 1.4%
‘Rapid development time’ is supposedly the most important factor, followed by ‘Flexibility and easy extendability,” “Engine performance,” “Support and documentation,” and “Prior successful use by another team”.
Cheers KF for the tip!
Category: Nokia, Windows Phone
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I don’t get it – according to this post’s title – who gave what to the developers? :S
According to those game developers surveyed, 8.8% are making games for Windows Phone 7.
I think he is referring to the article title “Gave Developers” as maybe a typo, unless it really is spelled as such. “Game Developers” or “Game Developers” ?
Ah yes I see. Typo fixed.
haha and that means 8.8% of devs are interested in 0.4% of mobile market of windows…! Really funy! I like it.
Actually that just might be 3-4% of paying customers. 0.4% is just WP’s size of the mobile penetration. That makes a huge difference.
No it doesn’t make any difference as one can compare only compareable values. This is not China gov stats used for political needs. Besides when windows market is 0.4% and only 3-4% of 0.4% pays then it really looks even worse. Otherwise we would have situation when 3-4% pays but only 0.4% has windows what would mean that 4-0.4=3.6% of paying customers pays and DON’T have possibility to use = to launch what they have paid for. So they are GHOST-PAYERS=USERS. And it doesn’t make any sense but shows that it is difficult to trust in such statements. Unless we have situation that sb. pays to himself to have false proof of “great success”. I really doubt that more people pays then there are people who declare to use system.
I call this playing fool of me. I don’t buy it.
Sure, don’t buy it if you want to feel better.
Android’s software market is notorious because the people expect everything for free. Symbian’s market is incredibly fragmented as you have to test everything on evedy device depite of the Qt. You can also pirate your software on those platforms. That’s so easy.
Windows Phone users are willing to pay for their software and they don’t have easy access to the pirated games.
This changes a lot and makes the Windows Phone much more attractive for software developers.
“Symbian’s market is incredibly fragmented as you have to test everything on evedy device depite of the Qt.”
Wrong.
S60 and S^3/Anna are fully compatible and the only problems come up in Belle. Other than that, Qt does a good job at unifying the “ecosystem”.
Sure, so the software manufacturers just feel like not releasing the products on different handsets because it’s so fun to test the product before releasing it for some spesific device?
No way. Testing is required because of the fragmentation on the software platform. It has little to do with the ecosystem.
Firing up the app developers is clearly one of the early successes for the Nokia/Microsoft alliance.
They have failed or gotten mixed results in many things, but this is one area where they have shined.
Really, they started with 6000 apps on February 11th. Now we are close to 100 000 apps for Windows Phone (several exclusive to Nokia too).
was it really that low?
Might have been very slightly higher, but yes, it was max 10k at that point:
http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/news/item/14819_Windows_Phone_Marketplace_pass.php
WTF!! how on earth there’s more game developers for BB than Symbian??? Gaming on 2″ screens is awfull
Developers’ primariry concern is probably not the gaming experience of the end user.
It’s all about paying customers. Nokia had an almost decent number of downloads for Ovi Store but apparently it was no match for the BB’s offerings.
MNB new layout not good
Elop joined the wrong ecosystem. Even old Symbian wasn’t that badly supported.
Yeah, game developer support fos Symbian was probably at its highest when Symbian market share was at its highest and before Apple and Android brought in their developer tools and stores.
For sure without open gl
there is no way to see games ported to wp7
Android + ios + symbian + bada + blackberry use open gl for graphics
only wp7 use xna c#
xna is better but not mainly used for mobile games developing
.
opengl is the standard for anything this days on mobile computing, its not even only games making use of it, its everything.
Porting OpenGL to DirectX is pretty trivial and vice versa. It is so well documented and been done for so long. The real issue is that most of the big company games are written in C++ and Windows Phone does not offer this yet. However, according to the dev plan it will be starting this winter.
This chart gives Nokia some hope. From this point of view Nokia’s Lumia is really using the 3rd ecosystem.
developer will move to windows phone because windows phone still can not side load apps.just like why they move to apple
That’s one very good reason for that.
All those free and completely open platforms hurt the developers because it’s easy to get everythig free.
Platform being open and free has nothing to do with how easy it is to pirate products on it.
Are you sure about that? While cracking the device may not be so hard, it voids the warranty and most customers won’t go for that. That’s one reason it’s actually hard while it’s not hard to do it.
Open and free devices let you to install any software you want. Including those pirated games. Open and free doesn’t equal to piratism but it sure makes it easy just because it’s not closed.
That’s why there is less pirated products and more revenue on platforms having closed and controlled software distribution system.
INSTALLED BASE OF SMARTPHONES BY OPERATING SYSTEM AS OF Q1 2012
Rank . OS Platform . . . . . . Units . . . . . Market share . . Was in Q4 of 2011
1 . . . . Android . . . . . . . . . 328 M . . . . . 32 % . . . . . . . . ( 27 %)
2 . . . . Symbian . . . . . . . . 299 M . . . . . 30 % . . . . . . . . ( 35 %)
3 . . . . iOS . . . . . . . . . . . 178 M . . . . . 18 % . . . . . . . . ( 16 %)
4 . . . . Blackberry . . . . . . 111 M . . . . . 11 % . . . . . . . . ( 12 %)
5 . . . . bada . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 M . . . . . 2 % . . . . . . . . ( 1 %)
6 . . . . Windows Mobile . . . . 16 M . . . . 2 % . . . . . . . . ( 2 %)
7 . . . . Windows Phone . . . . 9 M . . . . . 1 % . . . . . . . . ( 1 %)
Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 M . . . . . 5 % . . . . . . . . ( 6 %)
TOTAL Installed Base . . . 1,013 M smartphones in use at end of Q1 2012
Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Estimates May 16, 2012 from vendor data and other sources
This table may be freely distributed
Especially hobbyists (surely part of this survey) have a habit of doing business decisions based on feelings and what-not. A smaller, professional game studio surely cannot justify developing a Windows Phone app (which has to be done from scratch) to target the absolute marginal corner of the market. That’s why Windows Phone users will continue to enjoy being left out cold of the hot new technologies developed on competing platforms.
And based on the sales of Q1 of 2012, Windows Phone is not taking off any time soon. It’d be a success for it to double installed base by the end of this year, which still leaves it a very small niché indeed.
Those numbers do not tell the story very well though. Android and Symbian both are great examples of a skewed market, because although they have huge numbers they are fragmented across a large range of devices with different capabilities and available API’s. Technically speaking, Android could be broken down into at least 30 different segments with each one being roughly the same size as Windows Phone.
Developing for Android and Symbian is much more work than developing for IOS or Windows Phone as well. I can’t tell you how many apps I download for Android that I can never even get to start up. Big name apps at that.
I gave up on Symbian a long time ago but I also had similar experiences with that.
To me this is really a marathon between IOS and Windows Phone. The others will all be left behind due to poorly thought out futures.