Pocketful of Megabytes has an insightful interview with Halfbrick Studios Chief Marketing Officer, Phil Larsen, about various aspects of the games released by the studio in recent times including their latest Xbox Live Arcade platform title, Raskulls. Their biggest hit, however, is Fruit Ninja, an arcade fruit slicing game which has amassed over 2 million sales on the Appstore for the iPhone and iPod.
When the opportunity to bring Fruit Ninja to the tens of millions of Android handsets out in the market arose late last year, Halfbrick was on board. They claimed the #1 paid game app position in the Android Market within 24 hours of release, but on further inspection, the actual sales numbers were disappointing. Pocketgamer.biz estimated the app only made between 5,000 and 10,000 sales, despite being in the top position on the app chart.
In this interview, Phil expressed how the Android marketplace has fallen short of providing a similar kind of service as the Appstore and described the market size differences between the two platforms as "significant". From Pocketful of Megabytes...
PL: Well, despite some enthusiastic Android gamers claiming otherwise, that market is much smaller than iTunes by a significant margin. Android devices are selling very well, but the core gaming ecosystem is not set up like the App Store is in regards to usability and consistency. There are no checks or reviews on Android – you upload your game, or app, or program of any kind, and it is live on the store immediately. Overall, game downloads are much lower on Android, even at the top of the charts.
Google themselves have recently acknowledged that they're "not happy" with the low number of paid apps purchased in their marketplace and promised to resolve many of the current issues, some of which were described by Phil above, later this year.