Fallout Shelter Android will 'hopefully' be available in a few months
Bethesda Softworks has revealed an Android version of Fallout Shelter is currently in development, although it won't be coming anytime soon.
Bethesda announced and released Fallout Shelter during its first-ever E3 press conference, and so far, it’s been absolutely killing the App Store top-grossing games chart. Unfortunately, Android owners have been sitting idly by while iOS owners have been merrily playing the role of a Vault Overseer. But Bethesda has revealed it is working on an Android version of the game.
Shortly after the release of Fallout Shelter, Bethesda revealed they’re working on an Android version of the game through its official Twitter account.
Yes, we're also working on Fallout Shelter for Android. Hopefully out in a few months.
— BethesdaGameStudios (@BethesdaStudios) June 16, 2015
While this can certainly be seen as great news for Android owners who have been dying to be a Vault Overseer, we have a feeling the game will hit the platform shortly after the Fallout frenzy dies down. Although with the game releasing this November, will the Fallout frenzy ever die?
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Daniel Perez posted a new article, Fallout Shelter Android will 'hopefully' be available in a few months
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It's also just a really bad business move. They say it's not about the money, but it already reached the top of the App store, and they essentially could have doubled revenues if they released it on Android as well. I bet if you did a study, it would likely show that majority of gamers have an Android phone.
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Is this honestly still the case? I mean, I'm reading this from Cnet:
In the fourth quarter, Apple shipped 74.5 million iPhones, a 90 percent increase from the previous quarter, while shipments of Android-based phones slid 5 percent, to 205.56 million units.
This means there were 2.5x more Android phones shipped vs iPhone. Yes, fragmentation, and it could be that iOS whales spend more than Android Whales. But, I'd think the law of large numbers would play out that huge numbers of Android device would net game revenue.
Although I think the skew here is that the Android numbers probably include more developing markets and iPhone does not. So, maybe my point/question is moot. . .-
It doesn't matter how many raw android phones ship if
a) a large number of those phones are underpowered pieces of shit you get for $30 at the grocery store on a prepaid plan. I mean, every new phone Apple ships today is at least an iPhone 5, there are still Android handsets being delivered with 2.3 and no GPU.
b) a large number of those phones are bought by people who are unwilling to spend money on in app purchases.
THAT ALL SAID I'm curious if Bethesda used Unity or some other engine known for being cross platform. I would imagine no seeing as how it came out for iOS first but then again Hearthstone did the same thing and it took a while to get on Android phones too.
It could be the real answer to your question is yes, because of the QA effort involved. There's thousands of different Android devices out there, there's like like nine different iPhones.-
Totally not discounting the fragmentation issue. It's real. And, demographically speaking, global iPhone purchasers probably have more disposable income, as a whole, than global Android purchasers. But, it would also depend on how globally available the app/game was too.
I haven't seen any numbers like this, but I would find them fascinating to study.-
There aren't any hard numbers on the Android side for a few reasons.
- Most manufacturers aren't publicly-listed American companies and thus don't have to report their sales. In this case the companies send out press releases stating shipments, not sold units.
- Over the years it's come to light that several Asian manufacturers (specifically Samsung and Xiaomi) exaggerate their shipment numbers. If you can't trust the source then what good are their numbers?
- Of the companies that do state their units sold numbers, they (and Apple does the same) almost never separate the numbers by model. So for example, if 100 million units are sold, how many are $900 high end units and how many are $80 entry level units?
- Different market research firms uses different methods for analytics. There are often widely different results from different firms. So no one report will ever be accurate.
Using Samsung as an example, in 2014 the company shipped about 306 million smart phones. Supposedly the Galaxy S5 has shipped about 30 milion units. And we'll add another 6 million for the Galaxy Note 4. A phone capable of playing the latest high end games makes up only about 12% of all of Samsung's phones shipped in 2014. A developer targeting Android can reasonably only look at this specific segment of owners - 36 million.
Now 36 million is a huge number, so what's the problem? The problem is that neither Samsung or Google have data on who those owners/users are, how much they spend on mobile apps and how often they purchase apps. So now that 36 million is probably a whole lot less.
Apple does things differently. The company collects a lot of user data. It's not so much that iPhone owners probably have more discretionary income to spend, but rather Apple has real data on how its users actually spend because the company knows users' Apple ID, the specific phone model linked to that Apple ID, the number of apps downloaded, the amount spent on apps by user (and age, geographic region and language) and how active that user is on their phone. This is real data that developers can use when determining how to best utilize their limited resources when planning which platform to focus on.
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Ya, but is that a constant 'rate'? Because if it's just a static number that can change if Android keeps selling more raw numbers.
I don't know the answer, and I'm not trying to defend Android here. I'm looking at it from a business perspective. I see a reporting saying that Android is selling far more phones than Apple, globally. That means there should be an order of magnitude more people that 'could' spend money on Android than Apple. But, if the demographic economics is that the amount of people that 'would' is constant, hence the rate, then that's different. That's why I said about emerging markets. Then again, that's the first to market strategy as those users are probably less likely to switch, so the long play.-
The total number of phones sold (on any platform) doesn't mean much if you can't segment those numbers.
For example, let's say that Dell sold 100 million PCs in the past 12 months. Sounds great for a game developer right? That's a huge market right there and so the developer decides to make The Witcher 7 for PC based on those Dell numbers.
But how many of those 100 million PCs come with a GPU that can play games at 1080p? How many of those owners of PCs with a good GPU actually play games? How many of those gamers are willing to purchase games? How many of those purchasers enjoy games like The Witcher 7 and will purchase them? Now you don't really have a market of 100 million users anymore but more realistically a lot less.
This is why the whole iOS vs Android argument is silly. Both platforms have so many different segments within each of them taking it all as a whole is meaningless. Only by focusing on specific segments is the data useful for business decisions.
Here's another example... At an old job, I used to represent 40,000 corporate members. Vendors of whatever services would come to me to get access to those 40,000 companies. Except I also knew the breakdown of the industries that those 40,000 members were in. So one time I was negotiating with Air Canada because Air Canada wanted to sell, through me, to those 40,000 members for corporate and business travel. But the truth of the matter was that of those 40,000, I knew that maybe only 400 would actually use corporate business travel, and I knew this due to knowing the segmentation of those 40,000 members. So Air Canada didn't really have a potential market of 40,000 companies to sell to, but rather just 400.
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iOS customers spend more money on average than Android customers. The people who spend $200+ on phones are more valuable customers than the people who spend $0-50 on phones. Much of Android's volume happens in markets with less money (developing markets) where the Android Play store is not the most popular store (China). The simple fact is that many companies do release iOS and Android apps and despite Android's marketshare dominance they keep learning the lesson that their iOS app is a much better ROI.
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Android also has significant movement in the high end in markets that do have app stores, and there have been a number of developer stories in the past year that strongly disagree with your last statement.
We're actually taking our focus off of IOS and going multi-platform this year, and the vast majority of potential customers we've talked to want our products on non-iOS devices. We aren't doing games, and some of the drivers for that won't carry over to entertainment products, but if we were doing games I think we'd still go multi-platform.
I've been working on a replacement for a flagship native app this year - this new one renders in a webview, using WebGL for the main canvas, and it's literally indistinguishable from a native app in any way at this point. Performance has been great even on old iPhone 5s and 2+ year old Android phones. -
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I'm not sure what you mean but at the very least this app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rovio.angrybirds
Is the real Angry Birds on Android. The clue is the Rovio reverse domain name notation.
This isn't to say there's not a hundred Angry Birds knockoffs, many of which use the same icon and name, but at the very least this one is real.
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