Hi.
Have you taken into account the possibility that your numbers are as
they are because your windows releases are on a platform that's been
getting games, while not as many as we'd all like, for a long time, and
your releases on mac are dropping into a big gaping black hole of people
who have been clamoring for games for all this time? Of course we see
the gravitation toward thinking of iOS as a good gaming platform also as
you've said if I'm not mistaken affects all this, but that's not really
in line with my thoughts right now. By that I don't mean I disagree with
that too I'm just thinking about windows sales vs.mac exclusively here.
Thinking about myself, I wanted to buy your mac games for my 2010 mac
book air, which I don't use for much more than trying to stay familiar
with mac so I know in my own mind how they compare and can try to help
friends out with mac questions on occasion. I heard about your mac
releases and I wanted to go buy them just to say thank you for giving us
something to play besides RSGames on mac OS. I haven't done this yet,
but I haven't bought any games in quite a while except a couple of 1
dollar games on iOS.
but my thinking is, you have people excited to be able to play on mac,
and curious how well you guys made it work. Could that have inflated
your sales a bit?
Granted, it doesn't really change the point, the fact would still be
that you're selling more games on MAC and the people you're selling to
on that platform are more involved, I think that's what you mean about
the demographics anyway. Just something I wondered about.
Cheers, Sent with thunderbird 17.0.8 portable
On 12/13/2013 11:05 AM, Draconis wrote:
Chiming in on these cross-platform topics seems to be a common theme for me. LOL
I have three points I’d like to make.
First, ignoring Mac as a viable platform for blind gamers is a poor strategy.
One year on, and Mac sales are still far exceeding Windows sales, even in
comparison to back in the hay day of audio games, some 10 years ago or so. It
isn’t just about raw user numbers, it is about demographics and the quality of
those users.
Which leads me to my second point.
There is an old saying: “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
This could not apply to anything as well as it does to the statement that
Android is more popular than iOS overall. It is technically true that Android
is used in more devices, but that is because many of those devices are not,
strictly speaking, Android devices. That is to say, they are not being used as
portable computing devices like iOS devices are. Kindles, Nooks, many models of
feature phones, and countless other gadgets, all get lumped into the Android
user numbers, even though many of those devices are so limited in scope that
users don’t even know Android was used in their development.
This is why, in the areas that matters, iOS’s numbers are so much better than
Android’s, despite the marketshare numbers that the media likes to quote. iOS
consistently has over 80% of web usage from mobile devices, for example. iOS
users are for more likely to pay for apps, too. iOS users also spend more time
on their devices, showing greater engagement with the platform. And those kinds
of numbers go on and on.
It is the same kind of trick as companies like Samsung use that create
headlines in the news like: “Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy blah blah”. In
reality, they shipped that number to resellers and warehouses. Shipped, but not
necessarily sold to end users. Samsung never actually releases specific sales
numbers. They only ever announce numbers of units shipped. It sounds better
that way.
Apple, conversely, only ever announces sales to end users, and never the number
of units shipped.
All of this, before you even start taking into account the fragmentation of
Android, which is a disaster that Google is continuing to scramble to get a
hold on with nothing to show for it. Less than 2% of Android devices are
running the latest version of the OS, compared with over 70% of iOS devices.
Android is a support nightmare for developers, much as Windows is.
Granted, that 2% number may be slightly skewed, given Google’s continued desire
to artificially inflate the usage numbers of Android, but it is still a huge
problem for the platform.
My final point is a technical one.
We explored a number of options for developing the Draconis Engine, including
experimenting with various languages, techniques, and technologies. We have now
shipped multiple titles on three platforms in the space of eleven months. Three
Mac releases, three Windows releases, and one iOS release. (This assumes you
count the Show Cases for Mac/Windows.)
The Draconis Engine was created with C++ primarily, with very tiny portions
written in Objective-C to cover OS X and iOS GUI, and small portions in C# for
Windows.
While C++, like any language, has advantages and disadvantages, if you are
interested in cross-platform development, particularly game development, we
found that the relatively minor trade offs were worth the huge advantages we
gained by going this route.
Just about all other cross-platform methods, like Java or Python, come with
huge disadvantages, as I believe Tom has mostly already covered.
Hope this is helpful.
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