Gameloft turning a cold shoulder to Android

With the introduction of the new Motorola DROID and a slew of new handsets expected to launch early next year, you would think that developers would be lining up to jump on to the Android platform. For some, this may be the case, but Gameloft has plans to cut back on their investment on the Android platform. Gameloft is one of the largest game developers for mobile phone and a quick search in the At an investor conference this week, Alexandre de Rochefort, the finance director at Gamloft announced “We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others.” Android market reveals that they have 24 different games for the Android platform, all priced at $2.99. “It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue,” Rochefort said. Rochefort also indicated “We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android.”

Gameloft is naming the Android Market as the main culprit since it’s still unclear if any developers have made significant profits on the Android platform. It’s unclear how much Gameloft will pull back from the Android platform, but it’s sure to be a big blow to the people at Google to see such a large developer cut back on new games.

Though Gameloft is pointing the finger at Google, they might actually need to point the finger a little in their own direction. Their current game offerings on the Android Market are actually not that impressive. Many of them are actually just poor quality ports of games they previously released for the iPhone. It says a lot when your most popular and highest rates game is UNO. Most of Gameloft’s games are between the 1000-5000 downloads tier, with UNO being the only game to surpass the 5000 downloads threshold. In my opinion, Gameloft needs to step up the quality of the games they offer on the Android platform and might even need to change the genre a little. Just because something sells well on the iPhone does not mean it will be a hit on Android as well. What seem to work best on Android are puzzle and strategy games. Games that are a bit addicting that make you come back for more. UNO, Brain Challenge, and Bubble Bash HD are the only games in Gameloft’s lineup which offer that experience.

A simple shift in development might make a big difference for Gameloft

Source: Reuters