Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Windows Phone Store
The
Windows Phone Store
(formerly, Windows Phone Marketplace) is the service
provided by Microsoft to allow users to browse and download applications developed
by third parties for their Windows Phone powered phones. The Modern Style UI
presents a panoramic view, where users can browse items by categories, see fea-
tured items, and get details, such as ratings, reviews, screenshots, and pricing in-
formation.
The Windows Phone Store was launched in 2010 along with Windows Phone 7 and
by 2012, it already offered more than 100,000 available apps.
To submit apps to the Windows Phone Store, an annual subscription fee of $99 is re-
quired, which offers an unlimited number of submissions on the
Apps+Games
sec-
tion of the store.
Apps must be approved by Microsoft: a strict control is wielded on the contents
in order to forbid pornography, promotion of violence, discrimination, hate, usage
of drugs, and the like to be included in the applications available on the Windows
Phone Store.
For apps that are sold on the store, Microsoft takes 30 percent of the revenue (70
percent goes to the developer). Developers are paid only if they reach a set sales
figure, but above a revenue of $25k, the shares become 20 percent to Microsoft and
80 percent to the developer.
Developing apps with Windows Phone
Apps and games for Windows Phone can be designed with Visual Studio 2010,
Standard and Express editions.
Windows Phone 8 offers full support for native C\C++ libraries, thus allowing easy
porting of Windows programs to Windows Phone 8. This also allows developers to
port iOS and Android applications, since much of their code can be maintained, thus
widening the range of available apps for Windows Phone.
Desktop games designed for Windows 8 can also be easily ported, thanks to the full
support Windows Phone offers to Direct X architectures, and HTML 5 can be used
to develop apps as well, depending on the features needed by games and apps.
