French mobile publisher Gameloft (
Hero Of Sparta) says it's scaling back its investment in development for Google's Android platform -- and that, dissatisfied with Android's weak application store, other developers are following suit.
"We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like... many others," Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference, as
reported by Reuters.
Android's app store is "not as neatly done as on the iPhone," De Rochefort said. The company's also displeased with Google's outreach efforts: "Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products," he adds. "On Android nobody is making significant revenue."
Gameloft claims to sell 400 times more games on iPhone than Android, according to the director. 95 percent of the company's revenue in its fiscal third quarter
came from mobile games, and the company's revenue from the segment has climbed 17 percent over the past nine months due primarily to the performance of its iPhone titles -- which accounted for 13 percent of revenues in the last quarter.
However, with many models of Android phones still to launch, and sites like MocoNews.net
pointing out that companies like Glu and CBS are still actively developing Android apps, it's possible that the market may develop in the future.
