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Hit game on Win RT makes £52 in first week

ymmv

Banned
The Windows 8 app store has one entry point:

games2-1.jpg


If you click on Games, New Releases or Top Free you'll see the endless rows of tiles. It's possible to filter on a category and sort on ratings or price, but since the store is filled to the brim with amateur stuff like that "Zelda Game" there's no incentive to go any further than the first page and then close the store quickly. It's shovelware central.
 

Totakeke

Member
Honestly, I'm surprised Play Store apps even sell. The layout of the app store is beyond terrible. Go to the deals section and you'll see a screen filled with icons that all seem to look the same. There's nothing that will make a good app stick out from the mediocrity and shovelware that dominate. That's no way to entice potential customers to try out the apps.

play-store-sales-longest-day-660x568.jpg
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
It sounds like they made a poor business decision and were too busy whining to take responsibility for it.

People are allowed to talk about the decisions they've made and the consequences thereof. It's not "whining" to offer a cautionary tale for others and explain the logic of your actions and the outcomes.
 

Risette

A Good Citizen
Honestly, I'm surprised Win 8/RT apps even sell. The layout of the Windows 8 app store is beyond terrible. Go to the games section and you'll see a screen filled with brightly colored tiny tiles that all seem to look the same. There's nothing that will make a good game stick out from the mediocrity and shovelware that dominate. That's no way to entice potential customers to try out and buy games.
Such a hideous interface.
 
People are allowed to talk about the decisions they've made and the consequences thereof. It's not "whining" to offer a cautionary tale for others and explain the logic of your actions and the outcomes.

True enough, I suppose whining is a pretty harsh word to use. I still feel like they're placing way too much blame on not getting promoted, rather than the platform's weak state as a whole and some poor reasoning on their end.
 

Pooya

Member
edit: it's already in the OP, I read it in the other thread.
------
they updated the blog

http://www.rubicondev.com/blog/windows-rt-born-to-fail/

If anyone already read this post, it has had a very positive effect and Microsoft have graciously decided work with us to iron out the problems and get us past this incident.

With a sense of fair play, I’m putting my grumpiness on hiatus and deleting the juicy bits. Which was all of it, sorry.

The title change is pretty funny xD

"Windows RT - born to fail" to "Windows RT – Might work out at some point"
 
I dunno, these guys don't seem like they have much if a case to me. Apple doesn't feature any old game, for example - to be featured on the iOS App Store you have to use whatever new features Apple is currently pushing, such as the built-in Facebook stuff in iOS 6 or native iPhone 5 support. So why should they just expect Microsoft would feature their game? From the goodness of MS's heart?

It seems really odd to me that they somehow made their game only work on RT, when RT and Windows 8 are supposed to use the same API's and stuff. In theory an RT game should run on Windows 8 and vice/versa. So it makes sense that MS didn't feature their game, they didn't use one of the big points Microsoft is trying to promote, the fact that Windows RT is Windows 8 without desktop apps.
 

Azih

Member
Honestly, I'm surprised Play Store apps even sell. The layout of the app store is beyond terrible. Go to the deals section and you'll see a screen filled with icons that all seem to look the same. There's nothing that will make a good app stick out from the mediocrity and shovelware that dominate. That's no way to entice potential customers to try out the apps.

play-store-sales-longest-day-660x568.jpg

It's better than the tiny coloured boxes of the Windows Store though, at least you've got a visible icon and the rating visible. Much larger tiles and way better filtering options would go a long way.
 

Totakeke

Member
Still too many colors.

But it makes them look different! And distinguishable! Skype app has its classic blue color. Xbox apps has the strong green tone. OneNote app is purple!

Honestly, you don't like colors? Eh, whatever. The people using iTunes 11 seem to enjoy their new dash of color.
 
Eh, that's enough for 72 440ml cans of Stella if they take advantage of the current offer at Sainsbury's. At least they can drown their sorrows.

ASDA are doing 20 cans (of Fosters) for £11, so that's almost 95 cans. 23 more cans to drown their sorrows.
 

Risette

A Good Citizen
But it makes them look different! And distinguishable! Skype app has its classic blue color. Xbox apps has the strong green tone. OneNote app is purple!

Honestly, you don't like colors? Eh, whatever. The people using iTunes 11 seems to enjoy their new dash of color.
I like colors, but I like them to be a fixed scheme. That just ends up looking busy and visually polluted. People should recognize things through the name and icon...
 

AgentP

Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
What, seriously? That's the interface they went with?

That is their interface for all devices and OSes now, brightly colored rectangles. It's barf inducing.

This port must have been easy though, I was told x86->RT ports were just re-compilations.
 

Nemo

Will Eat Your Children
Figured Microsoft would only actually do something once bad publicity started coming out. Might've even been the end goal of the developer in the first place
 

R1CHO

Member
It's possible to filter on a category and sort on ratings or price, but since the store is filled to the brim with amateur stuff like that "Zelda Game" there's no incentive to go any further than the first page and then close the store quickly. It's shovelware central.

The store is a piece of crap, so bad.

Im pretty sure that if he isnt directly stealing assets and copied the exact script then its fine. Have you seen some of gamelofts stuff? Order and Chaos online being the most blatant.

The game is called "Zelda game" though.
 

AgentP

Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
If the x86 program was written against the WinRT APIs to being with, yes. If not, I am sure it would not be that simple.

What is the point of an API if it is OS specific? An API is supposed to abstract away those differences, the x86, RT, WP8 should all have the same API.
 

Risette

A Good Citizen
What is the point of an API if it is OS specific? An API is supposed to abstract away those differences, the x86, RT, WP8 should all have the same API.
sometimes, to lock people into developing for/with your products (unrelated to this discussion)

x86 isn't an OS, it's a processor architecture.
 

JaggedSac

Member
What is the point of an API if it is OS specific? An API is supposed to abstract away those differences, the x86, RT, WP8 should all have the same API.

WinRT is architecture independent for the most part, although there are most likely some graphics API differences. The issue is that the x86 version of this game was created before the WinRT API was released. If they had created the x86 version against the WinRT APIs, then the ARM port would have been trivial most likely.
 

maeh2k

Member
Aren't there like only two Windows RT devices that have been released? (Surface and Asus Vivotab). If they don't release a Windows 8 store app so that all those Windows 8 PCs and Windows 8 tablets can run the app, then it's no surpise that it goes unnoticed.
 

Cipherr

Member
Granted, it's not much better than other App stores.

No, its way worse than other app stores. They need to ditch the multi rainbow colored tiles and give them all a uniform light colored backdrop. The current design looks like ass.


No.

Give them all a single backdrop color. Just choose a color and make it uniform. It would make it all muuuuch easier to look at.
 

ymmv

Banned
No, its way worse than other app stores. They need to ditch the multi rainbow colored tiles and give them all a uniform light colored backdrop. The current design looks like ass.

No.

Give them all a single backdrop color. Just choose a color and make it uniform. It would make it all muuuuch easier to look at.

The problem with the app store is not the design, it's the structure. An app store should steer potential customers to good apps and make it easy to find them. If I'm a new Windows 8 owner and I want to download a few apps, I need recommendations, preferably lots of those in all kinds of different categories. The current MS app store has none. There's a store front that showcases a small number of apps, but there's nothing like that when you get a tile listing. Because the average quality of Win 8 apps is so low, you can't trust the rating system and if you simply browse you'll only find crap because there's no minimum quality check and the number of good games is appallingly low.

The current MS app store makes a terrible first impression and for the average Win 8 users, there's no incentive to take another look.
 

nib95

Banned
I'll be honest, I was going to jump back in to the Windows platform (mainly using a Mac now), but it's clear to me Microsoft are woefully behind and keep regressing. I'm going to stick with Apple (slightly begrudgingly) at least till the next Windows OS release. Windows 7 > Windows 8 imo. Also, why haven't they got rid of Ballmer yet? He's plagued Microsoft from the get go.
 
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