The End of Indie Game Development on Android

http://polyclefsoftware.blogspot.com/2012/07/end-of-indie-game-development-on.html?m=1

 

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/featu..._isnt_androids_biggest_problem_piracy_is.html

 

I tend to agree to this comment

 

I thought the same thing but someone said they were able to sell as many units as IOS.I think you either have to do 1 of two things, either go with a good publisher or somehow get your game to go viral.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/14...y-Asset-store-Mobile-Casual-Desktop-Web/page3

 

The part about people getting viruses after downloading priated apps , ha ha . Just like PC piracy you pay a price when you try to get something for free .

Android doesn't feel all that profitable regardless . Even if your game isn't pirated their aren't all that many people who will pay for a game on android( not enough to support many devs anyway )-

 

I wish more could be done to shut these APK hosting sites down. This is ridiculous.

 

Have to wonder how this will go: http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...rch-changes-to-curb-access-to-pirated-content

Google's plans to try change the way results show, so it's not as easy to find pirated content.

It's really sad, well - it's really kind of effin' annoying - the apk thing. I was going to add another comment over to that TOB KS thread, but I wanted to check something first - so I do a Google for: Super Mario Bros Android. I'm not sure there was a result on the first page that wasn't a link to downloading a pirated apk...meh.

 

Were you expecting a link to Nintendo's official port? Hell would freeze over before they put a first-party IP on a non-Nintendo platform.

 

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Holy S*** ...

 

No, I was expecting links to various pages for companies that have developed tributes, clones, and the like. What you see when you do the search in Google Play, except instead of linking to games - linking to the sites for the developers. Even adding the word clone or tribute, still brings pirate links.

 

It's kind of funny, thinking about that - the discussion about apk piracy, and how many torrent apps there are in Google Play.

Search for "torrent" - Android Apps About 397 results...

 

My main phone is galaxy nexus, and i have no problem with buying apps. My biggest problem with the store is that i simply cant find any! Front pages are flooded with games like "where is my water", minecraft, cut the rope, gameloft ripoffs and so on..
And then you go to featured, and its Zen Bound 2 ( got released on the launch of iPad 1), Asphalt 7, Ski Safari etc
Apps that already made millions. Play store feels like a delayed iOS hits only market.
It seems that the only way to get any kind of number is to
1. Build an indie game that by no standards feels indie, which is impossible
2. Spend gazillion hours on the web, sending review request to every website remotely related to android. Asking for support from podcast hosts, spamming gaming forums, praying to gods from every religion etc
3. Give up, and contact a publisher like chillingo. Wait a few weeks and get rejected because your app is not family friendly or any other reason.
4. Shut down your game engine, and go back to your 9 to 5 job that you probably hate.

 

Huh?

 

Hotel Mario
Link: The Faces of Evil
Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon
Zelda's Adventure

Through some wonky licensing agreement they did allow these to be made. All considered to be the worst versions of the IP, and Nintendo would certainly like to pretend that they don't exist...but still.

 

These are specifically why Nintendo will never do this again, I'd bet!

 

I forgot about those.
Wow those sucked.

Android definitely has issues and until they try to fix it, this will be a problem.
Free and open is great but at what cost.

 

Have to wonder how the Linux deploy's going to work, eh?

 

At first i was really excited about publishing my own app but then my hopes got crushed. I am thinking of joining McDonald's instead. Its been 3 days and it has only 1 download. (yeah wow) anyway here is the link. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.red3games.swipebinary.google&hl=en)

 

Uh guys.

Dying would imply that android game development was ever alive to begin with as a premium income stream. It's been piss poor at best and it's down to google's management:

1. no real drm, so it became the most pirated platform in the history of mankind
2. riddled with malware and scams
3. horrible discovery
4. little to no enforcement on hardware requirements

That generally means its fun for consumers but delivers very little business. When that changes I'll take a closer look. As it is, it's not worth investing in for us. Walled garden = money. It's also the reason there's no android ports of our games. We were willing but the market wasn't worth the risk. I bet that will only get worse until google decides something actually has to be done about it.

In before someone claiming there's lots more to be had. Some people did 'well' but it's not a bankable platform.

 

This appears to have been fixed recently, but when we put our game on Google Play in late 2013 an exact search of the game's name wouldn't return it in the results. Probably won't waste my time on Android anytime soon.

 

Kind of terribad search result from the world's biggest search result provider. It's just embarrassing.

 

The search is still fuxored most of the time.

 

End users aren't Android's clients. They are the product. The real clients are handset makers and advertisers, none of whom give a damn about piracy. I'm sure no one at Google or Samsung would lose any sleep over turning a blind eye towards piracy if it meant selling more handsets.

Piracy isn't a bug. It's a feature.

 

As I see it this is the heart of the differences between iOS and android. Android lets anyone do whatever they want. iOS forces you into there mould. There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems.

I don't see google doing anything real to combat piracy as long as freedom to do anything remains a selling point.

 

i think the answer is to redefine what you view piracy to be

 

I've said a few times the market needs to shift to making money off of pirated products, rather then trying to fight piracy. Treat piracy as a distribution medium.

It's a nice attitude to have for someone who has no vested interest in the industry. It doesn't help someone who is genuinely loosing money to piracy.

 

I doubt there will be any end to Android Indy development. More likely is it will become the #1 source for free "my first game" games that "nobody" sees. There are simply too many people continually coming into game development hoping to make money in mobile development who have an Android phone.

 

I half-finished an essay on why piracy is not as big a deal as the billion-dollar companies want you to think it is, but then I realized that a lot of people are just way too trusting of those companies and the lies they spread. So I'll just succinctly list my opinions on the matter. The giant companies involved have so corrupted the studies and data that it's impossible to present data either way with any certainty it's reliable.

#1: The vast majority of people pirating media wouldn't have paid for it in the first place. Yeah, believe it or not, your average Chinese citizen can't afford to fork out $20+ for a DVD of Rob Schnieder being an idiot. If it's even legitimately for sale in China.

#2: Piracy can drive sales up. Turns out people aren't generally total bastards. Many people buy a legit version after pirating something. Just because somebody grabs a pirated version of a movie doesn't mean they won't later want the Blu-ray boxed set. In fact, since downloading has no financial commitment, somebody may download a movie they wouldn't normally watch, love it, and be motivated to buy the DVD and other related material.

#3: I lost track of the industries piracy was "killing" a decade ago. They're all doing fine, some better than others, but the predictions don't seem to come to pass.

#4: It's easy to blame piracy for your game's failure. The more likely causes? Your game is buggy, your game is not fun, your game is not well presented, and you're no good at marketing. The general You, not a specific You. If you're reading this, you're most likely a programmer or an artist. Marketing is its own specialization with its own degree. Sorry, but you almost certainly suck at it.

Summary: If your game fails, blame yourself, not the ubiquitous pirate bogeyman.

 

Goggling iOS piracy rate, I found that it's not much better. MadFinger, Monument Valley and Robot Invader report 60-87% iOS piracy rate. Interesting part is Robot Invader says that the main source is China while MadFinger says it excludes China data and still sees high rates.

 

Another post, another guy justifying piracy.

 

@Dameon_, all these arguments don't even apply to this discussion. We have here an example of a mobile platform where games sold and sold well (i.e. iOS), versus another platform where the exact sames games failed to sell, were pirated, and were often forced to either abandon the platform or seek a different business model focused on IAP and advertisement (i.e. Android). The major difference between the two platforms is how easy it is to pirate games and resell them on the same app store from which they were pirated.

I don't need to hypothesize about "piracy driving sales up" or subscribe to some conspiracy theory abut multinational corporations rigging market research in their favor (though I hardly doubt that the makers of "World of Goo", who cited a 90% piracy rate for their game, have the money to burn on lobbying and fabricating data). It's all there in black and white: More piracy on Android compared to iOS. Less money on Android compared to iOS. Less piracy, more money. More piracy, less money.

 

Which billion-dollar companies, specifically? Seems like everything is the fault of those big evil corporations these days.

There is no way to know for sure who would or would not have paid for it in the first place. In the end it doesn't matter, because piracy is still stealing.

True.

 

Or you know, use metrics so you can see immediately the ratio to pirate vs paid. And when you find out that the metacritic score is >80 you know something's wrong. OH WAIT... that's *exactly* what people are doing. And that's why the pirate argument is killed stone dead, every. single. time.

 

My argument isn't that piracy is good, or in any way an attempt to justify it. Theft is theft. I'm certainly not arguing that it doesn't happen quite a bit. I just believe that correlation doesn't equal causation. I don't believe in conspiracies, just that funding for studies has to come from somewhere, and it's not hard to skew statistics. That's not conspiracy theory, it's business theory.

My main argument is that if it's stolen, it's generally by somebody who couldn't afford it, or wouldn't buy it in the first place, or somebody who will later buy it. So, not as big an effect on a game's ability to make money, except in cases where pirated products are resold. That's not justification, for those who want to think I'm saying it's okay.

Pirating software on iOS is just about as easy, so I find it hard to believe that that is a primary factor. I strongly agree that the Play Store sucks, and that's probably playing a role in its appeal to developers and users. I have a hard time sifting through the dross to find something interesting, that's not a clone or somebody's beginner project or just plain doesn't work.

 

Piracy, in fact, does inhibit a game developer's ability to make money.

• Pirated games overwhelm expensive servers with unauthorized players, especially the type of players who'll DDOS game servers for lulz or even try to hack the servers and steal information or bypass payment mechanisms.
• Customer support becomes overwhelmed by requests from unauthorized players wanting free support.
• Legitimate customers publicly complain about the number of pirated copies and illegitimate customers complain about the game not running on their outdated Crap-droid filled with malware.
• Game developers are forced to choose between spending their remaining budget and limited time on trying to keep pirates away or adding new features.

 

In fact it's a great deal better: 5% paid Monument Valley installs on Android vs. 40% paid on iOS.

--Eric

 

A percentage doesn't say much without the numbers to back them up. 5% of what total number of sales, vs. what total on iOS? Is the game much more popular on iOS? What countries are the unpaid installs primarily in? How many of the unpaid installs are later replaced by paid installs? And that's not even going into the fact that one game's statistics aren't necessarily representative of the overall picture.

That's the problem: We don't have any good data, or good independent studies. It's a bunch of guesswork mostly based on peoples' assumption that those thefts cause significant harm. And maybe they do, it'd be nice to know either way, but for now, we just don't.

 

I can confirm that my apps always get more plays on IOS!!

 

So a small developer who has a hit game states a fact about iOS vs Android paid installs, and goes on to add that due to that fact, they might not be releasing new content on Android.

A reasonable person might read that and think that said developer is not making enough money on Android to justify the effort, and that they used percentages and not actual numbers because they don't want to disclose how much money they are making, which is a very reasonable thing to do and will within the norms of this industry.

But your seem to imply that they either deliberately used percentages just to paint Android sales in a bad light, or that they are so terrible at accounting that they have failed to compare actual income on both platforms. What nefarious reason would they have to do the former? And what inside information do you know about them to compel you to believe that they are that stupid if it's the latter?

We have good enough data that goes beyond simple guess work. Perhaps it won't hold in a court of law, but it's more than good enough for making business decisions. It's way more reliable than assuming that piracy drives up sales without any sources backing up that claim.

As a side note: I'm glad that so far no one used to good ol' “piracy is not theft” debate-stopper.

 

Piracy is pretty rampant in my country. We are only just getting access to legitimate channels for a lot of content. I can say that almost no one buys the legitimate version after they have the pirated version. In rare instances someone will make the purchase of a DVD to replace a poor quality download. But that's probably less then one percent of cases.

We have got to a situation where people are used to pirating. Now legitimate channels are available no one sees the point. Why send money for something you can have free? Couple that with a general anti big American Hollywood coprate mentality, and no one is going to make any money.

Arguing that people can't afford content is ridiculous. If you can afford the hardware to play it, and the time to use it, and the internet connection to get it then you can afford the content. Sure, your choices would be severely limited. But we are not talking about starving people here, I you are pirating digital content, you've already taken care of the essentials.

 

I never implied anything. I stated a fact: a couple of percentages don't tell us anything. A lot of percentages have been thrown around in this thread, without giving us any underlying data. I don't think the developers are lying about their statistics, but I'm also not going to assume that they've correlated their statistics behind the scenes, and established any reliable means of proving that those statistics mean what they imply. Game developers are not data analysts.

Never assumed anything. I said it can drive sales up, not does. Looking back, it's a speculation I should've avoided making. Overall, I don't think piracy is good for any industry. I'd love to see the data you're talking about, because just about all the data I'm seeing in this thread is X% of Y installs are pirated. That's not useful data, it tells us nothing, it gives us no context.

I am gonna stick to my correlation doesn't equal causation guns.

 

A couple of percentages is still a couple of sample sizes more than what's in your data set, which is a big, fat, presumptive zero.

Last time I checked, a percentage is data, and a very reliable proxy for totals.

The correlation is right there: Android -> more piracy and less paid installs. That is the definition of correlation. Two phenomena occurring together without an obvious causal relation between the two. I'll break it down for you even further: Game released on Android correlates with increased pirated installs compared to at least one other platforms.

You don't seem to think much of us developers. And you're still demanding an unreasonable burden of proof from them:

• They have to be data analysts (Can they also employ the services of one? Or must they themselves be analysts?).
• They must provide exact sales and piracy figures across all platforms they have released on (do you accept their data if they aren't on every platform on Earth? Or Is that cause for dismissal?).
• Then they must retire to their labs and "[correlate] their statistics behind the scenes, and [establish] any reliable means of proving that those statistics mean what they imply", which is total gibberish to me, since you're demanding that there exists some second process that proves that the statistics show what they are already showing.

So you didn't assume that piracy increases sales. You assumed that it could drive sales. Making a claim without data backing it up is the definition of assumptions.

Two examples were already cited in this thread, which, I would like to remind you, is still two more than what you have.

It might not be useful in a court of law, but it's plenty useful for those making business decisions (e.g. whether it's even worth releasing a pay to play on Android). And I don't even know what you mean by it lacking context.

Not a bad idea. If only you weren't so grossly misapplying it. Applying logic doesn't equate with retiring introspection and analysis. By your Spockonian logic, manufacturing the iPhone wouldn't make any logical sense since there aren't any double-blind trials proving that a device exactly like the iPhone would succeed commercially. And yet, here it is.

 

@shaderop - I think we're starting to go in circles here. I still don't think you're quite getting what I'm saying, but I'm gonna back off and let others have the thread now.

Just realized this post was from 2012 and got necro'd. Guess Android indie game dev isn't dead yet.

 

The Monument Valley case is both fresh and relevant, and the status quo is still pretty much the same.

Maybe not, but pay-to-play game development on Android is pretty much dead and buried.[/QUOTE]