Paul Johnson of Rubicon says his company spent some $16,000 porting a flagship game (Great Big War) to Windows RT, which has thus far only generated $83 its first week on sale.
“A week after release we have made the princely sum of £52 ($83) in sales. That’s not a typo. And despite this, and the fact that GBWG is one of only several halfway decent launch titles, Microsoft have confirmed they will not give us any promotional features or help us with visibility in any way,” Johnson wrote in an angry blog post.
“If you’re familiar with their new store, this means our app is forever consigned to the garbage bin, presumably earning us less than £52 a week in future. Even if that rate is sustained, it will take just under two years before we recoup the salary paid to the guy who did the port.”
According to Johnson, his company has wasted a lot of time, resources and money on supporting Windows RT.
“All that happened was we got spat on. Apple regularly promote our apps. Android regularly promote our apps. Even RIM (Blackberry) regularly promote our apps. We enjoy working with those companies and it’s nice to see them acknowledge that we bring them some small amount of additional value to their setup. Firms our size need a bit of a leg up, and we go out of our way to show our gratitude to the above for helping us out in this way from time to time.
“Microsoft on the other hand clearly do not value us at all. Even whilst there’s almost nothing to promote, they will not feature our title for bizarre admin reasons. And this is whilst their store is empty and they need developers like us to fill their store far more than developers like us need them to pay us £50 a week.”
It should be noted that Johnson has since taken down his blog post, replacing it with the following statement:
“If anyone already read this post, it has had a very positive effect and Microsoft have graciously decided work with us to iron out the problems and get us past this incident. With a sense of fair play, I’m putting my grumpiness on hiatus and deleting the juicy bits. Which was all of it, sorry.”
