Telltale games for Android

[TelsonNethers]

Anyone knows that they will/won't release their games for android? Because iPhones, iPods and iPads are too expensive for me, and I have a smartphone with Android OS.

[Macfly77]

Telltale's crofael posted this in response to a similar question a few months ago:

Originally Posted by crofael

We currently have no plans to do releases on Android. The main reason has to do with hardware. iOS devices all have a similar profile: there's an easily identifiable minimum amount of memory, CPU and GPU power that we can target from an engine standpoint.

Now think about Android. How many different Android devices from how many different manufacturers are available? In the hundreds. And for the most part, they are all extremely disparate in their hardware specifications. Between this device fragmentation and the fact that most Android devices on the market are not all that great for gaming, we'd rather focus on making our engine better on the platforms we already do support.

All that being said, I'm a programmer and so I'm not up to speed on what our sales and marketing plans are for the future, so it's entirely possible that at some point we'll start putting our games on Android. But in the meantime I'm afraid it's not in the cards.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. :/

[Friar]

Why not simply focus on the high end popular ones, such as the galaxy SII OR HTC sense? Or even the popular higher powered tablets (Xoom, transformer and galaxy tab.) The fragmentation concentrating on those can't be any worse that on iOS (iPad, iPad 2, iPad 3, iPhone 3g, 3Gs, 4, 4s, iPod touch 2nd, 3rd and 4th Gen etc.) I've included the high powered apple devices there that are still in decent circulation and that telltale still support ( well, as far back as puzzle agent 2 anyway. ). That's without mentioning the fragmentation found on windows.

I think a lot of developers are too quick to breeze over android. No-one expects them to support every device on the market. Ignoring the underpowered and minority models still leaves you with a sizeable extra demographic dying for some decent games.

Us tablet users are just dying to try the latest telltale has to offer! And numbers can't be the issue there, after all, Sam and max was one of the first iPad games out there!

[jeremu]

Let's face it Android has got some amazing phones out there. I have the Samsung Galaxy S2 and S3 and both of those phones will put any iP-whatever to shame. Android has a huge market and its growing. Why not prototype one of your new games on Android and see if its worth the investment.

[corruptbiggins]

Just read this today in the Penny Arcade Report:

(source: http://penny-arcade.com/report/edito...e-of-the-walki)

We definitely want to get our future titles and past catalog of games live on Android devices. We’ve done some of the initial work on the engine to get there but there are many issues for us. The disparate hardware specs, piracy concerns and state of the Android equivalent of the App Store make it very hard to bring our games over to the Android OS. To counteract these issues with the Android platform, and ignoring for a minute the huge issue of widely varied specs of Android devices, our games would need to be built and/or sold distinctly different than we do today on all other platforms. Will Walking Dead: The Game come to Android? We hope so, but nothing to announce today.

That should at least give some hope to Android users. But a good point is made in there in that piracy is a huge issue with regards to Android apps. One of the top guys at Sports Interactive says that this is the biggest problem with Android, that it's so easy to pirate stuff and if that continues to happen there will be little chance of quality apps for Android devices.

[roylovelock]

why not do it the same way as they do on pc, the user enters a key, x amount of activations and the product dies until the owner contacts to explain thier actions.
i personally have been a user of android from day one, and love the os to pieces, i have a very short stint with ios and hated it - in fact i returned the handset after only 3 days of use (well the use that ios imposes).
i currently own a htc one x and the awesome nexus 7 tab, as well as the older galaxy tab 7.0 and an archos 101. but i know for a fact that if telltale ever bring thier back catalogue to the platform then i would purchase most if not all the games.
if you decide to sell the games it easy - just release them on the tegra zone and you will know only higher end devices will be able to get the games.
when i see games like gta 3 and ripspeed running in HD it makes me sad that i cannot play my monkey island games on the devices, infact i think machines like the nexus 7 is ideal to run games like this. please telltale get the games to the ever increasing army of android users...

[xaeru]

The big problem with trying to correlate X million in illegally downloaded games to X million in lost sales is that it simply doesn't work like that. There is no quantifiable number or study out there that shows a direct correlation between those numbers. So when you see these "studies" that claim piracy costs an industry millions in lost revenue, it's simply a load of made up numbers. In fact the U.S. Government has basically admitted that most piracy estimates are bogus. The Government Accountability Office said that it is "difficult, if not impossible to quantify the economy-wide impacts". What video game publishers should be doing is stop blaming piracy for their lack of sales and look at from a different angle.

Source: http://www.blog.last-save.com/2010/0...me-developers/

Piracy does not hurt sales. Do they really think that Apple products are piracy free?

Man you could even use something like kickstarter.com to get the money up front and then you wont have to worry about the sales part.

Im not going to buy an apple product so I can play this game... But I would totally buy it for android.

[smeli]

Piracy concerns? You might not realize this, but there is a lot of piracy going on with iOS apps. It isn't at all difficult to find pirated iOS apps, so the comment about not wanting to port to Android due to piracy is not a valid excuse. I can fully understand wanting to have a solid experience for your customers, and it can be difficult to do that with so many Android resolution and screen and device differences, but please don't try to lump piracy in with your supposed reasons for not creating Android builds.

Yes I would love to see an Android version of The Walking Dead. I have an iPad 3 but am selling it as it has been replaced with a Nexus 7. If you ever decide to release an Android version, I'll be one of your newest customers.

[Aureusx]

Worldwide apps hacking stats are biased because of the chinese market;
European stats are much more balanced between the two platforms (at least for my apps)

In china, every app had to be hacked because it was impossible to purchase any app at all.
The possibility to hack apps has driven market adoption for android.

All that led to this consensus that android is less profitable than IOS.

For sure it is less profitable now. Most good tablet apps people would pay for are on IOS only !

Now that things are changing, this happens : http://en.paperblog.com/google-play-...e-weed-366263/

But it takes time to educate users, and your communication channels must evolve to reach android users.

Porting is not enough, communication is key.

My two apps have 4 and 5 star reviews, one is a port of a c++ app, features only 300 lines of code more than the original progam, is an audio app with opengl visualizations, have had more than 57 000 downloads and sold for 2 $ each.

On Ios as I couldn't port the live screen feature, it didn't sell as much, except it is heavily hacked on jailbroken devices... don't know why yet.

As a side note, I wrote the app and tested it on 3 devices, and got only 2 crash reports yet from android users...

[AbusDerBambus]

"Piracy concerns" is a reaaaally weak argument, considering there is just as much piracy on apple devices.

"[...]fact that most Android devices on the market are not all that great for gaming[...]"

Huh?

Android devices are in fact the best, most powerful devices you can get for mobile gaming. CPU-wise and GPU-wise. The most powerful smartphones/tablets on the market are android devices. Compare the specs of the current flagship of Apple, the laughable Iphone 5, with the Galaxy S4 for example. Oh, by the way not forget that there's an 8-core version of it, too.
I highly doubt the Iphone 6 will have something like that, let alone the 5S model. And then theres a new, better android device anyway.

Android is also undeniably the best platform for any kind of mobile software, because there are no licensing costs, no review of the apps you make, an easy do develop open platform, most android devices have a usb otg port with support for a lot of hardware, a hdmi port, and most importantly expandable memory.

Because that's the most insane thing apple does. They want 100$ more for double memory, and people buy it anyway. Meanwhile, I pay 15$ for a class 10 additional 16GB micro sdcard. *trollface*

So, Telltale please start seriously considering android ports, because by now the platform Android has overstripped Apple as a whole company. Because ultimately it's a huge, and growing market that you are missing.

[DAISHI]

Reply to AbusDerBambus: No.