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for previous approval of applications in the store; their functionalities and
contents are the responsibility of the developers and publishers. However,
the main conditions for developers are relatively similar to Apple's: Google
retains the right to remotely remove applications from the device; it does
not provide customer support for applications distributed on the Android
Market; it does not allow content that contains nudity and sexually explicit
material, violent or bullying behaviour, hate speech, private and confi den-
tial information, malicious products, prohibited products, illegal activities
or infringes copyright rules.
The strategy of Microsoft's Windows from the perspective of develop-
ers is similar to that of Apple; a “close” model. However, interestingly,
Microsoft has introduced interoperability packages in its SDK, enabling
mobile developers to port their iOS and Android applications to the Win-
dows Phone mobile operating system.
As a summary, according to the Game Developer Research 2009-2010
survey of 814 video game professionals, 25 per cent of game developers are
building titles for the dif erent mobile platforms, up from just 12 per cent
the year before. Also, according to a survey of 850 developers in seventy-fi ve
countries that used eight dif erent platforms (VisionMobile 2011), 67 per
cent are currently using Android, 59 per cent use iOS, 56 per cent mobile
web (that is, a mobile browser), 46 per cent Java ME, 45 per cent Black-
Berry, 38 per cent Symbian and 36 per cent Windows Phone. Both Android
and iOS have grown 10 per cent in comparison with 2010. This same sur-
vey displayed that the biggest driver in platform adoption for developers is,
rather logically, market penetration.
All in all, the impact of new platforms and application stores has been
considerable from the perspective of mobile gaming development: whereas
development and marketing costs for a console or PC game may run in the
millions of euros, the costs for a mobile game were already typically in the
range of the hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even less (Soh and Tan
2008) before the emergence of platforms. Within the new platforms these
riers for mobile games have helped spawn a proliferation of small mobile
game software developers and the possibility to account for the long tail of
potentially interested gamers. However, the low costs of development in the
new mobile platforms and the availability of a direct-to-consumer chan-
nel are counterbalanced by the relatively high number of platform options,
which, as a direct consequence, leads to an increase in transaction costs for
developers who wish to work across several platforms. Therefore, on one
hand, platforms reduce costs due to the simplifi cation they introduce in
the ecosystem, and, on the other, competition among platforms increases
costs. The overall result is thought to be generally positive on developers
but could change over time.
A similar tug-of-war happens in the development of mobile games. Devel-
opers are the key element in the innovations provided by mobile platforms,
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