Bad news for Android gamers out there – the platform has lost another developer. Mika Mobile – the creators of Battleheart, a popular fantasy/strategy/action game; has announced that it will no longer be supporting Android. According to the blog post, the company isn’t making enough money selling Android games compared to the amount of time and money spent working on and supporting them. Here’s the main gist of what Mika Mobile had to say:
“We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another – porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn’t go through. We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.”
For the amount of time spent supporting Android games, Mika Mobile expected to make more money so it makes sense for the company to leave the platform behind. But with both of its Android games created using the Unity engine, it does make one wonder how come they have problems with Android support when other developers haven’t really said anything about it?
As of now, Battlehearts and Zombieville USA are still available on the Google Play Store though there’s no telling when Mika Mobile will take them down if they ever decide to.