John Carmack, the man who basically invented modern first person shooters, recently spoke to NowGamer. The interview is mostly about id’s upcoming Rage for PC and consoles, but at one point John Carmack gives us a bit of an insight into his view on development for iOS and Android.
He evaluates the Android platform every six month to judge if it’s time to start developing for it. His conclusion to date is that, as a developer, you are just not making money on the Android platform as you do on iOS. He says it was interesting to see at their last Quakecon, when he took a hands poll, that almost as many people had an Android device as an iOS device – but once he asked who had spent 20 bucks on games in the Android store, that number changed drastically.
Carmack goes on explaining that it’s just fun to develop for iOS and that they had made more money on the Doom RPG stuff than people may expect. And when they show people what they are working on for iOS, these people would often react with the desire to start developing for iOS themselves.
At the end Carmack jokes that id actually even hired someone to be their Android guy – but it looks like he’ll be “stuck on iOS development”.
