The gain-less, game-less Android store
What is a market if it doesn’t sell products? Why the Android Market of course!
The weaknesses of the Android store are becoming more apparent as Gameloft declares that it and others are cutting back their investments into developing games for the Android.
A while ago, one of the Android Market’s most prominent developers shed light on the sad state of affairs at the Android Store. The developer from Larva Labs — creators of RetroDefence and Battle for Mars, two of Androids most popular games — showed that despite having his applications in the top 20 Android applications, all he managed to get was a daily average of around $62, which is rather meagre compared to the $3500 / day such an application would earn at the iPhone store.
He highlighted the problems with the Android store, and what might be done to improve the situation. Among them was the Android Market’s tendency to highlight free applications more than paid applications. Although Google has taken steps to correct that recently, with updates to the Marketplace in Android 1.6 and 2.0; it doesn’t seem to be enough.
We see that a lot of organizations have started embracing open source principles, however they still need to make a profit, and Android doesn’t seem to have that bit figured out. Alexandre de Rochefort the finance director at Gameloft commented about the Android marketplace, “It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue.”
The result is that Gameloft has sold 400 times as many applications on the iPhone store than the Android store. Hopefully Google will rectify the errors, it would be sad to see an open system like Android marketplace fail while the iPhone’s AppStore continues to accelerate.