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Game Developers Scaling Back Android Efforts as iPhone Continues to Dominate

Friday November 20, 2009 11:34 am PST by Eric Slivka
Reuters reports that prominent iPhone game developer Gameloft is scaling back its efforts to produce content for the Android platform in the face of weaknesses of its application store. Gameloft also notes that it is not the only one making the move, with other game developers reportedly experiencing similar frustrations.

"We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like ... many others," Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference.

The company's frustration comes from a lack of success on the Android platform, contrasted with Apple's App Store ecosystem and its ability to drive sales for developers.

"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," Rochefort said.

Games for iPhone generated 13 percent of Gameloft's revenue in the last quarter. "We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android," Rochefort said.

Several months ago, mobile app developer Larva Labs offered an analysis of the massive sales gap between the iPhone and Android platforms, noting a number of major deficiencies in Android's application store implementation. While Android developers have since moved to address some of those issues, the platform has yet to generate the buzz and critical mass to drive application sales to levels that make financial sense for software developers.

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