If not the ipad then what instead?

[famousringo]

rocketpig said:

famousringo said:

disolitude said:
@famousringo and mrstickball

Im out for the night and can't look for specific examples and apps but there are lots of very successful windows phone exclusive apps. I am on every windows phone news and xna developers RSS feeds and and every week a new success story is shared by a dev. Usually windows phone apps perform better than Android counterparts.

Look up Elbert Perez for a very successful developer exclusive to windows phone.

This guy, huh:

http://www.wpcentral.com/2011-lessons-learned-windows-phone-developer

So, he has twelve games to his name and they earned him $61,000 last year. I'm supposed to believe that this guy is capable of churning out a quality game every month or so and that an average of $5,000 revenue per app is big success? That's a decent income, sure, but a single good app on iOS can make an indie dev a millionaire (granted, those million sellers usually take more than 30 days of work to make).

I see your point but you shouldn't take the assumption that all of those games he created last year suddenly stopped selling. And that $61,000 was probably back-loaded; in January and February when he had 1-2 games for sale, he probably made squat. By November and December when he had close to a dozen for sale, he probably made the bulk of that $61,000 in those two months. It takes time to build a catalog large enough to sustain a living and those old games aren't suddenly going to disappear because the calendar flipped to 2012.

The opposite, actually. It's in the link. His big months were February, March and July, his lowest months September and November.

It's hard to know exactly what effect time will have on app sales. I know a highly priced app can burn slow for $250 or even $1,000 dollars a day if they do a good job serving a niche market. Free to a buck games are, I think, more dependant on high placement on the charts. Users are rarely so committed to a cheap app as to go hunt it down, or if they do, a handful of downloads a day from dedicated customers doesn't work out to meaningful revenue.

Anyway, my original point is that while Windows and Xbox are more often than not lead platforms for software development in their respective categories of computing, Windows Phone is at best the 3rd most popular platform for mobile devleopment. (I've heard rumours that Blackberry's App World is surprisingly strong, but I've never seen hard data to back that up.)