“Windows Phone is a rapidly growing market where indie developers can be successful. We are looking forward to an even better second year as indie game developers, and can’t wait for Windows 8!” Great to see success stories like this. Since I run my own one-man business as well, I somehow feel kinship.
Windows Phone is not rapidly growing in my definition of the term. Sure, it grew 50% in a month, but when you have no market share it doesn’t take many sales to give you that. They are so small a part of the market that Nielson doesn’t even track them separately. Windows is lumped in with the “Others” category. For indie devs to be successful, you need users. At this point there just aren’t any.
Yeah. I’m really sick of all the advertising from companies about being “the fastest growing company”. Of course you’re the fastest growing, percentage-wise, since even tiny increases in customers/sales/products/whatever lead to huge percentage changes when you’re small.
You can get 100% growth by going from 1 customer to 2 (increase of 1 customer). While the same 1 customer increase for an established player will be a 0.0000000001% increase. Doesn’t make you any better than the established player, but doesn’t it look more impressive?
Gah, marketing spins on stats make me sick.
Edited 2012-04-18 23:26 UTC
I’ll bite and pile on as well. Android’s success in china is amazing. Smartphone share from small to 33% in one year, up over 68% the next year while apple hasn’t broken 6%, symbian shares crashing. No MS on the radar. Considering there’s almost 1 billion mobile phone users in china it seems like this might be news worthly.
The really sad part about that? It’s Nokia’s own damn fault for hiring a moron for CEO.
The Symbian platform was HUGE in Asian countries, the ‘next million’ or whatever their marketing BS was, but they went and screwed it up by not advertising the N9 and telling everyone that Symbian was dead.. then not so dead.. then dead.. and all the while saying “Hey, we have these Windows phones that have already had a history out there and people hated ’em…”
Boggles the mind how that man is still employed.
When you get to a certain level it no longer matters how bad you are. There’s always some schmuck ready to give you an overpaid job that you can fuck up again. Rinse. Repeat.