Yesterday evening I uploaded Rune Escape to App Hub – The Windows Phone Market backoffice – and I am now awaiting certification by MS! Following is a comparative analysis of that process and the Google Market process: (1 – Google, 2 – MS)

Coding:

1. Coding the Menu’ing was easy. The game engine was hard. I struggled getting a smooth game play (Java isn’t exactly the first choice of language for most game developers…)
2. Coding the game was easy (converted the game in an afternoon). The menu’ing was hard (using api 7.1, under 7.5 this should be easier by combining silverlight and xna)

IDE Environment including emulation and debugging on phone:

1. Eclipse works fine and emulation and connection to handsets is easily set up. Emulation is slow even on fast computers.
2. Visual Studio 2010 express works well. Perhaps a bit more “polished” (I hate to say) than Eclipse. Emulation works much faster than on Android. Setting up a handset for testing is a hassle though! It took me about 4 days from starting on the journey until I had the game on a phone for debugging. Not technical problems but redtape (see below)

Registering for markets

1. Easy – just used my google account, and as google has a registered EU entity there are no need for any US tax forms to set up money transactions in either direction.
2. Hard – First you have to pay £65 for a year’s membership of App Hub, then a 3rd party company has to verify you exist, and are who you say you are, and then after that they cannot activate the account, MS does that, which takes and extra 2-3 days. (All of this time you aren’t allowed to debug…) After that they still have to receive a US tax form by snail mail to their US entity of the corporation. This is strange as the EU headquarters are less than 10 miles from my home, and I literally drive past them every day going to work! So they must be set up to deal with UK/EU tax authorities directly. (But it gets stranger still – see below)

App Business model

1. It is hard making money on Android. There are many developers fighting for the pot, and after Google removed the “Just In” section on the market, new apps don’t get exposure automatically, so you need to be big to make an easy entrance. Additionally few players buy paid for games, and ad-support and in-game purchase  seemingly are the two models that work well.
2. We’ll see about this once the game is published. But there are definitely less games, and the NEW section automatically creates exposure to new apps. The trial versioning of MS phone games is interesting to test out, which I do in my first game. Ads can be used (which I do in the trial version), and this was reasonably simple to set up. Only MS’s ad service seemed to support XNA apps, so I use them. Setting up an account required me to create an electronic US tax form, which took about 30 mins to do, but once done, fine, I had a working account on the spot. WHY oh WHY can’t MS use this within the App Hub. The method clearly works, and is efficient! Or even better – set up a system where it is not necessary? Being multinational should come with such perks….

All-in-all an ok experience to convert Rune Escape, but I can understand if the redtape acts as a deterrent for some international developers. Now that I have done most of it, I cannot wait to compare how the market models compare to each other…