A recent article on Engadget recently quoted the CFO of Electronic Arts where he said that the company was very interested in Android as a mobile gaming platform, but “I think the next big positive way to push better growth in mobile will be the deployment of an App Store equivalent for the Android operating system.”
Seriously?
Granted, I know the market needs work, and it’s not the most intuitive thing for customers looking to discover apps. But they DO have an app store.
Engadget also mentioned Gameloft, one of the larger publishers for iOS. Gameloft has several of their most popular games (including N.O.V.A) available for android, but the only way to get these games is to purchase them through Gameloft’s own website and side-load them onto your device.
But Why?
The Android Market’s not perfect, but it’s still the best (and most used) way to get applications to consumers. Sure, their game might get buried initially, but even buried in the app store, I’d be willing to bet they would still sell more that way than they do by selling only through their website.
But is the Android market really that bad?
It’s not perfect, and I’ll be the first to admit to that. In fact, if I ever get around to it, I might even blog about it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not profitable.
Let’s look at Openfeint, a very popular social gaming network that started out on iOS and just moved to Android this week. With titles like FruitNinja (you’ve seen it in the official iOS commercial) they are the kings of quick, simply, and addictive games.
But do their games sell?
FruitNinja was released just this past week, and in that time it sold over 10,000 copies (the range in the market is listed as 10k-50k). Another application, called minisquadron, sold between 5k-10k copies. These are just two of the estimated 50 apps they will launch on android this month. At $.99 a download, a minimum of $15k in revenue this week isn’t too shabby.
How did they do it, even without an “app store?”
Openfeint doesn’t have the marketing clout of EA Games, and yet they still had a press release when they announced their Intent to develop for android, and another when their products actually launched.
Gaming is one of the areas where iOS has an advantage over any current platform, so when a company that made it big on iOS announced they would start porting apps, tech journals took notice. Once the games initially launched, every major android blog ran a story about it, giving Openfeint essentially free advertising for the event.
But what about the difficulty of finding Openfeint games? They created an “app store” app to showcase applications that take advantage of their network. Inside the app, you can view preview pictures, shortcuts to movies, and if you’re interested in the game, you’re one click away from a direct link to the market place of the game itself, meaning you never have to dig through the market to find their latest titles.
So if Openfeint can do it, why can’t a company like EA do the same? A lot of EA titles include DLC right? Why not tie in mobile apps?
