Tumble, coil & fumble

If you’re conceptualizing a game these days, chances are you are planning for a personal device rather than a console, for a variety of reasons. Easy deployment, managed payouts, clear add-on revenue paths, easy subscription options, being able to keep up to 70% of the sales being just some of them.

With that in mind it makes sense to look at actual numbers that commercial blogs oddly enough don’t want to put in perspective. However it is vital when you put half a year or more of your life into a project. Sure, some will argue to give the game away for free and sell t-shirts. Which is just why you started out with the project, right?!

Comparing single devices to a cumulative of a myriad of other devices only wins you a war of numbers, but it never gives you a useable result.

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When you talk to game developers that jumped on Android based on the fact that it has the widest distribution you’ll soon hear a different story. It’s not just games though. Games often get sponsored by a device or chip maker (like the Nvidia sponsored Tegra targeted games) to actually make an app possible. I’ve heard a similar tenor from music app creators. It seems like creative production apps don’t quite seem to catch-on with Android users. Why is that?

Device distribution and device retention may give you a hint. Commercial press always put Android phones (all of them) vs the iPhone (two devices) while only like 3 Android phones are actually sort of comparable. Now we took 80% off the list (possibly including toasters, fridges and microwaves). So what are those 80% then? It’d be facetious to just call them burner phones but it’s not too far fetched either. The 80% are phones that are primarily used for phone calls, text messages, email and basic web browsing and extremely casual games (think Angry Birds1).

Also those phones aren’t that well supported and usually just dropped on the market from their manufacturers, sometimes even defaced with a carrier specific user interface. Yes some still do that. Vodafone toggled their defacing efforts back to bright red icons and preset bookmarks that you can’t delete on the recent HTC handsets. So that’s a plus.

Doing the Math

Numbers from Apple Earnings Reports, roughly normalized. Check yourself if you need them down to the colon.

So we have around 140 million iOS 5 capable phones out there that have the exact same aspect ratio, form factor and you talk to the same hardware types. No guessing what some vendor may have packed from whoever was the lowest bidder.

When we’re talking tablet markets though, let’s be realistic, there is NO tablet market, only an iPad market.

Now take the 2010 device breakdown into consideration where those 140 million phones made up 58%, iPod touch handhelds 32% and the iPad 10% tolling up to roughly about 241,224,000 devices running iOS. Take off the 10% of iPads which require different design approaches and you get around 217,101,600 devices where you only need to scale down graphics for your secondary build and know it’ll just work otherwise. It may kind of suck if it’s a hardcore 3D game, but I’ve yet to see this happen. Somehow game developers don’t seem to have that issue as much as they should considering the difference between 3gs and 4s CPUs.

Projecting Androids

Android’s numbers look a wee bit different. Gartner projects 179,873,000 Android devices for 2011 and 90,560,000 iOS devices (despite actual sales suggesting otherwise). What you do on iOS will work on 90% of the devices in circulation without a hitch and the other 10% with graphic jitters or having to select a saved image instead of taking a live one.

On Android however you’ll find out that from those 179,873,000 to be sold, you can really use about 10% for iPhone level games. Looking at the prices and general appeal you can further narrow it down to about 8%. Which means you effectively have a roundabout of 14,389,840 to work with where you can be reasonably sure that your game will work as intended and not crash the device.

Since there are over one hundred different Android handsets with vastly varying hardware, screen size, resolution and form factors, it’s really hard to count which device would measure against that. Closest I’ve gotten to a match was this Samsung series that mimics the HTC Windows mobile series4.

An interesting fact with Android though is that there isn’t ONE Android to start from. Every device maker cooks their own version, leaves things off, adds things. Put an HTC Android on a Samsung and you can send in the device to service. This kind of recursive sub-fracturing doesn’t even exist in the Windows world. You can marginally compare it to Linux distributions if they were bundled to specific hardware.

Retention

Here’s the major difference to Android phones. Circulation retention. iPhone and iPod touch units get sold on eBay when a new model looms or is released. They don’t end up in a landfill right away (and most parts are directly recyclable anyway). Also they have a single digit return rate to stores which usually ends with them becoming cheaper refurbished models you can buy in Apple Stores with refurb contingents or on the Apple Store online. In short, unless a device is completely obliterated, it stays in circulation.

For a developer this means a shadow market of equal to double size of the proudly published new activations.

I wasn’t able to gather any significant retention numbers on any of the specific Android builds or devices in circulation. Just this basic support chart comparing iOS and Android devices on The Understatement, which is borderline scary to say the least.

Another thing nobody seems to cover are device returns. We don’t ever see them deducted from the activated devices. The only mentions I’ve ever seen was on excessive return rates of the Motorola Xoom tablets. A 60% return rate however would have sparked more publicity than just a few tech blogs, so yeah… not entirely buying those numbers.

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For game developers specifically, the more you can focus your work, the more efficient you’ll be. Essentially it compares like creating for a PS3 vs creating for a Windows PC. One gives you a full spec sheet on features that will work, the other is completely opaque and requires a multi-device testing room driving up the costs exponentially.

I’m not making a recommendation one way or another since you can target specific Android devices too or even BlackBerry devices. You just need to go the extra mile there and do your own market analysis so you don’t end up supporting the best device nobody has. Or get a vendor to pony up the cost, but that’s not really why you went into this, to make it just for the vendor, right?

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1. Complexity example, not revenue. Angry Birds became possible on sequel platforms based on both their original success on the iPhone as well as 3rd party investments (DreamWorks’s Rio movie, Microsoft, Google). Once you have the stash of cash, you can take risks prohibitive to newcomers. ↩

2. Still on sale but capped in thought example to provide cleaner numbers. ↩

3. Just came out, don’t be a douche about not having numbers. Want something made up? Ask an analyst. ↩

4. Samsung Charge, MyTouch 4G Slide, Samsung Epic Touch 4G ↩