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Microsoft Windows Games

Hit Game Makes £52 In First Week On Windows RT 308

Posted by Soulskill from the congratulations-on-all-your-success dept.
Barence writes "Great Big War Game, a popular iOS and Android app, made only £52 in its first week on Windows RT. In an angry blog post titled 'Windows RT — Born to fail,' UK-based developer Rubicon blamed Microsoft for the paltry sum and said it won't be bringing any more of its titles to the fledgling platform. It seems Microsoft refused to promote the app as it would only run on Windows RT devices. However, Microsoft quickly got in touch with Rubicon, and the post was deleted and replaced with an apologetic response saying, 'Microsoft have graciously decided work with us to iron out the problems and get us past this incident.' Rubicon will be hoping that £52 figure improves quickly, as it spent £10,000 porting the game to Windows RT."
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Hit Game Makes £52 In First Week On Windows RT More

Hit Game Makes £52 In First Week On Windows RT

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  • Sorry to be frank but what did he think (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PopAndGame ( 2790489 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:20PM (#42216961)
    He took a business risk trying to port the game to Windows RT and lost? Now he's crying about it? Great, yeah, it costs money to port things to new platforms. But that's why you do your research first! Hell, I'm not going around yelling how my non-existing game on Steam is selling bad!

    But I know a thing or two about business and this is exactly why you research and don't cry about failed business decisions.

    • Re:Sorry to be frank but what did he think (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SydShamino ( 547793 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:24PM (#42217011)

      Sometimes you want to dive in, be first, and maybe get a huge portion of the market's mindshare.

      Fortunately for the rest of us, we can now review his experiences when doing our research. So the rest of us can be more cautious. Likely, though, the rest of us won't get Microsoft's dedicated attention to our game as he is getting now.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @01:37PM (#42218023)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:Sorry to be frank but what did he think (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Synerg1y ( 2169962 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @02:05PM (#42218403)
          He whined, so MS would take notice and help him off-set his loss. Not the most ethical of practices, but seems to have worked.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by PickyH3D ( 680158 )

          To be fair to the author, he released his software before there were any numbers.

          To be fair to Windows RT, it's sold through an excessively limited distributed channel (Microsoft kiosks and Microsoft Stores). To then expect overnight miracles for a game that, admittedly, I have never heard of is a little astounding. Granted, 52 pounds is probably a bit of a shock, but having never heard of it (as an admitted iPad and Surface owner), I can't really say I am stunned.

          It appears that he expected it be promoted

          • Re:Sorry to be frank but what did he think (Score:5, Interesting)

            by thoromyr ( 673646 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @03:46PM (#42219651)

            the Surface is actually a very solid (physically) device with much higher usability than my iPad (although I only have an iPad 2).

            That sounds interesting. What is "much higher usability" -- by itself that statement means nothing.

            Having a kickstand, USB port, microSD card expansion slot, attachable keyboard,

            Those are common features of android tablets (and kickstand and attachable keyboard are certainly available for iOS devices). What about their presence on the Surface makes the Surface notable for having them?

            larger (admittedly lower resolution than the "New iPad") screen,

            So, even though it came out after the new ipad it doesn't achieve the same resolution? That's a shame.

            direct access to the file system and bundled Office makes the Surface worth iPad money.

            For some folks I'm sure those are features worth paying for. Hasn't seemed to be that significant to the overall market, however.

            I'm honestly a bit stunned so many people hate it on Slashdot, beyond the obvious Microsoft bias, because it actually supports Flash.

            I'm really not quite sure what to say here. Maybe you aren't aware that the lack of flash is a *feature*? Not everyone wants to have crappy flash apps whether its on a mobile device or not. My desktop systems are flash free since I have a choice in the matter.

            For the record, I don't hate the Surface, I just fail to see anything to be excited about. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is similar specs at similar price (even having flash, ugh!) with the advantage of a mature marketplace. Or, a new ipad is better specs and a mature marketplace for a similar price balanced by the lack of a USB port or SD card slot. Its just hard to see any place for the Surface other than those who want to run MS Office on a tablet.

            That's something that even Android cannot say ever since Adobe stopped supporting "mobile" platforms.

            Again, I'm not sure you understand that this is not a negative for a significant fraction of users.

            • That sounds interesting. What is "much higher usability" -- by itself that statement means nothing.

              Ironic point.

              Those are common features of android tablets (and kickstand and attachable keyboard are certainly available for iOS devices). What about their presence on the Surface makes the Surface notable for having them?

              No one has anything as flat and integrated as the Touch Cover. No one. The Android tablets that do have kick stands are not the full width of the device; they're like little arms that extend,

            • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

              by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @06:42PM (#42221239)
              Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • To be fair to Windows RT, it's sold through an excessively limited distributed channel (Microsoft kiosks and Microsoft Stores).

            That's not quite true. Surface is only sold through those two distribution channels, but Surface is not the only WinRT device (though everyone expected it to be the primary one, given its positioning as the flagship of the platform).

          • Re:Sorry to be frank but what did he think (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Alphadecay27 ( 1277022 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @06:20PM (#42221019)

            To be fair to Windows RT, it's sold through an excessively limited distributed channel (Microsoft kiosks and Microsoft Stores). To then expect overnight miracles for a game that, admittedly, I have never heard of is a little astounding. Granted, 52 pounds is probably a bit of a shock, but having never heard of it (as an admitted iPad and Surface owner), I can't really say I am stunned.

            This game sells 100k+ copies/day at $3 a piece on android. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubicon.dev.gbwg&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5ydWJpY29uLmRldi5nYndnIl0. [google.com] It peaked at 500k/day within the past 30 days. Even if it had a massive refund rate (which it likely doesn't with a 4.5/5 rating) it probably made over a million dollars on other platforms within the same time frame. We're not talking about a tetris clone someone knocked out over the weekend from their mom's basement.

            It appears that he expected it be promoted by Microsoft because of their 10,000 pound investment, even though his company apparently refused to recompile and support x86, which sounds like an obvious no brainer. I cannot imagine that a game like theirs has many ARM-specific code blocks, and if it does, then I fully expect they are easily swappable for something in x86-land (if not just the high level language equivalent that would run faster on x86).

            They expected Microsoft to promote it because it is really popular game that has sold over 2.5 million copies on other platforms. They didn't "refuse" to port to x86. From his blog comments, it seems they have contractual obligations to not publish on x86 because they have a publisher (Viacom) that limits their ability to release on x86 since there is a PC version (through steam).

    • Re:Sorry to be frank but what did he think (Score:5, Funny)

      by kelemvor4 ( 1980226 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:55PM (#42217431)

      He took a business risk trying to port the game to Windows RT and lost? Now he's crying about it? Great, yeah, it costs money to port things to new platforms. But that's why you do your research first! Hell, I'm not going around yelling how my non-existing game on Steam is selling bad! But I know a thing or two about business and this is exactly why you research and don't cry about failed business decisions.

      I agree, I mean based on the headline it sounds as though nearly every single user of RT purchased his game. What more could he want?

      • Re:Sorry to be frank but what did he think (Score:4, Insightful)

        by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @05:23PM (#42220529)

        Snarkiness aside it's not Microsoft's fault that it's only on Windows RT.

        Microsoft has created a set of developer tools so that x86 and RT apps can be sold and used across all of your PCs seamlessly. This is Microsoft's pitch: buy an RT tablet and use it on all your computers.

        The game developer though sells his game *through a publisher* on Windows x86. So he's not allowed to sell it for both platforms. This wasn't a technological impediment it was a licensing one. So Microsoft--pushing a unified x86/RT universe failed to promote a game for him and give him free advertising since his game didn't align with their own goals of a great user experience where your applications run everywhere.

        I don't have a lot of sympathy that Microsoft didn't give random developer who I've never heard of free marketing and promotion. I see plenty of games on my surface being promoted by Microsoft? You're not one of them? Boo fucking hoo. Promotion space is a zero sum game. No matter what Microsoft does someone is going to fall from prominence in placement.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Charliemopps ( 1157495 )

      We have no idea what he was told by Microsoft. One of the biggest problems with Windows8 and their store is all the things it doesn't do that iOS and Android do. It doesn't even have a back button for gods sake. I have to imagine the store and distribution system has the same lack of features and is probably what he's complaining about. Microsoft probably tried to attract vendors like him by promising all sorts of promotion and such that he's not seeing as Microsoft realizes they have another Vista on their

    • Agreed. So the real message here is that RT will be a failure because it's infinitesimal market share makes the risk of expending resources on a port far too high.

      • 52 pounds implies that a seriously small subset of the RT marketshare bought his game. That is easily the fault of the developer, not the platform. I still think RT will be a failure because BIOS DRM is asinine.

        • And just how big is RT's market share supposed to be?

          • That doesn't matter. Not only that, but nobody can ever possibly know because Microsoft refuses to ever give honest answers about marketshare and never has. Sold licenses doesn't equate to active users doesn't equate to number of activated devices.

    • Tell you the truth, I misread the headline to say "£52K", and thought 'Hey, that's not too bad. What a whiner!'

      £52 pounds, though... I could probably make more than that just scanning in some recipes or a fart app. Or at least I could on Google's or Apple's stores.

    • Either that or you choose the right toolset so porting to all platforms is minimal work. Also, he apparently didn't get promoted because he was WinRT only. Perhaps if he'd taken the extra 5 minutes to set up and do an x86 build he would have gotten promoted.

  • You idiots (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) * on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:26PM (#42217047) Homepage Journal

    You ported your game to a new platform, out for a month on a single high end high price tablet, and you are shocked that you didn't sell as many copies as the Android version. There are hundreds of millions of Android devices out there, with a couple of million more being added every day.

    • No shit (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:47PM (#42217323)

      Also, it is for a game that has already been on sale for awhile, thus many have already played it and aren't interested in re-buying it.

      If they think there'll be massive sales on a new platform, well they are dumb. If they think there'll be massive sales on a new platform of a game that is old, they are doubly dumb.

    • There are multiple Windows RT devices. Surface RT is one, but absolutely not the only one. Its base price is no higher than a new iPad either, and I believe some of the competition is a bit cheaper.

      That said, while I don't really understand why MS wouldn't promote an app (just on RT, of course) simply because it's RT-only, it seems incredibly stupid of the developer to release the app as RT-only. Clicking on the Platform drop-down in Visual Studio, selecting "x86", and then clicking Build again was too hard

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 )
      There aren't millons of apps competing with yours neither. If there aren't many available choices and you are popular elsewhere, you should think that would be more buyers than your mom and 3 close friends. Heck, probably they could had better far sales in the Ubuntu Market.

  • Heard this same story over and over with indies (Score:5, Informative)

    by MetalliQaZ ( 539913 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:31PM (#42217117)

    This story certainly doesn't seem new to anyone who follows the development of indie games, especially WRT the Xbox360. Microsoft has a history of deprioritizing indie games in general, making it difficult to get promotion for titles without large publishers, and general indifference to a healthy developer ecosystem.

    No surprise, then, when mobile games suffer the same fate. They seem to think that they can just copy the worst parts of Apple's model and it will just flourish...

    • The Indie marketplace is so hidden away on xbox 360 that even some of the top 10 rated and selling games for the month have under 10k sales.

    • Re:Heard this same story over and over with indies (Score:5, Insightful)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:54PM (#42217421)

      Microsoft's most recent problems have been execution. The company by many aspects is too slow and bureaucratic.

      The Zune is a good example. The iPod came out in 2001. Many here thought it would fail but it didn't. As early as 2003 MS was working on a competing product; however, Jim Allchin called their own product "terrible". It would take MS another 3 years to get a product to consumers. At the time, the Zune was probably the best MP3 player out there (questionable color choices aside). The marketing was horrible; the PC software was buggy. But more importantly, MS failed to realize that the market wasn't in MP3 players anymore. Apple came out with the iPod Touch which was a portable computing device that functioned as a PDA/browser/MP3 player/whatever. The Zune never caught up.

      The Kin was another example. When MS bought Danger, the plan was to release a new phone in six months. It took 18 months and when released the phone was buggy and lacked a market. Insiders say many internal decisions doomed the effort. The Sidekicks used Java as the primary language, but being a MS product, that would not be allowed. The product team had to replace the entire OS with Windows CE. That decision alone would doom the six month deadline. There were two internal mobile teams and the Windows CE team refused to help the Danger team as they wanted to kill the project.

      • It's almost like someone had a time machine during the anti-trust trial and knew that if they split Microsoft into different companies, that would make the Microsoft ecosystem a bigger threat than if they just let it be one giant company that would fail after so many years.

        Someone should write a short story about that.

  • Expectations of Promotion? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by _bug_ ( 112702 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:31PM (#42217119) Journal

    It seems Rubicon's beef was the lack of promotion by Microsoft of their title. Is this promotion Rubicon pays for or is this an expectation that their app would be freely promoted for them?

    Is an app's success due in large part to the operator of the app store promoting said app? That seems like a system ripe for bribery.

  • Woohoo! (Score:3)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:32PM (#42217131)
    Wow, it's such a good thing Microsoft put all their eggs in one basket and made the desktop OS look identical to their tablet. Now if the tablet falls flat (well, it did), that will make even less sense than it did when people were beta testing and screaming about how stupid it is.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      All MS has to do is knacker the I'm-not-Desktop-UI for desktops and leave the mobile thing alone. Problem solved...except most people/companies still won't see any need to go to winders 8. I'm guessing the UI switch was to encourage people to move, but most do not appear to be swallowing the bait, the payoff just is not large enough for most.

  • It's Clearly Microsoft's Fault... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Revotron ( 1115029 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:33PM (#42217145)
    ...that nobody wants to pay for his game.

    Okay, so, £52 in the first week? That's about $83. That's roughly $12/day. In the first week. On a brand new platform.

    What the fuck was this guy thinking? That when he hit the magic "Submit" button on the developers portal for the MS App Store, money would start raining down from the ceiling? Did he think scantily clad women would arrive on his doorstep within minutes to personally "massage" him in a hot tub full of champagne?

    The title might as well read, "Developer Underwhelmed by Product Success, Blames Everyone Else".

    • Re:It's Clearly Microsoft's Fault... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MetalliQaZ ( 539913 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:47PM (#42217329)

      Sales generally peak very early in the release of a game. Opening week is extremely important for a game company.

      Don't forget that they have bills and salaries to pay. They can't sit back and live off a trickle of money, hoping it will grow at some point in the future. It's either make decent money or start laying off.

      It is a new platform but Microsoft made certain promises to developers, and this story shows that they may not be doing enough to keep those promises. It also shows that they seem to hold great power over them as well.

      • Re:It's Clearly Microsoft's Fault... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Missing.Matter ( 1845576 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:56PM (#42217449)

        Sales generally peak very early in the release of a game. Opening week is extremely important for a game company.

        This is true as long as the game company actually markets their game. It seems this company expects the app store to do its marketing for it, by way of featuring their game in a highlights section or some other way, and they didn't actually promote the game themselves. They invested a whole *10 grand* in development (absolute peanuts relatively speaking), but then decided it wouldn't be worthwhile to actually promote their work, and expect Microsoft to do all the leg work? Whatever promises Microsoft made to developers, I'm sure "we will handle all promotion and marketing of all apps in our store" was not one of them.

        • This is true as long as the game company actually markets their game.

          That's what I was thinking. If this game is so great and mindblowing, then why haven't I heard of it? I've never seen an ad for it.

        • Yeah $10,000 seems really low for a company to spend on development. Over a tenth of that cost would be just for a Visual Studio license.

          Although it seems to be high for phone/tablet game. I'm sure that some of the game studios spend a lot more than that on their games, though.

      • Whatever promises Redmond makes, the one thing they cannot do is put a gun to a consumer's head and force them to pick some RT device over an iOS or Android one.

        We said it all along. Microsoft was waaaayyyyy too late to the game. If an established player like Blackberry is getting dust kicked in its face by Apple and Samsung and the other Android manufacturers, then WTF do you expect a company coming four years later into the market to be doing? Yes, I know, there have been previous Windows mobile OSs, but

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pla ( 258480 )
        Don't forget that they have bills and salaries to pay. They can't sit back and live off a trickle of money, hoping it will grow at some point in the future. It's either make decent money or start laying off.

        Any of which counts as Microsoft's problem why, exactly?


        It is a new platform but Microsoft made certain promises to developers

        So if I write Pong 2013 for Surface, should I expect the full marketing force of Microsoft to make sure my crappy app makes a certain minimum profit?

        Microsoft earns its

  • What's the install base? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:34PM (#42217147)

    He should be happy with his 95% market penetration...

  • Where's the Windows 8 version? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:35PM (#42217169) Homepage

    An RT only version means that you're targeting a tiny portion of the user base. That's what, Surface RT users only? Not a lot of surprise that it failed given that target market.

  • Sincere question because just "spent $10k on it" does not tell much.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by alen ( 225700 )

      i played Great Little Wargame on iOS and it's pretty good. it has its short comings but a pretty good strategy/wargame overall

  • show me the money (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:47PM (#42217321)

    if Microsoft wants Surface to have any chance of success they need to start writing checks to the top devs to port their games/apps to RT. otherwise there is no financial incentive since the sales will probably not pay for the costs to port and test the apps

  • Actually, it *is* Microsoft's fault. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gestalt_n_pepper ( 991155 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:50PM (#42217369)

    Either their marketing and sales department is just dumb OR the software development divisions have so much internal clout that they don't have to listen. I'm betting on the latter.

    You want your platform to succeed? You need apps. You want a lot of apps quickly, you'd better make it EASY EASY EASY to port existing apps from other popular platforms to your new platform. Preferably, with one click. Another solution would be a near perfect OS emulator. However you do it, you have to do it.

    The Fuck You development culture of Microsoft says "No. Go recode and don't bother me with your problems. You're just an ISV after all. The only people we care about are large business customers." The other obvious characteristic that's becoming obvious is the assumption of success. MS obviously has no plan B. No backup to boost sales or make the platform desirable. It's "We're Microsoft. Here it is. Take it or leave it."

    Frankly, I don't see how Microsoft is going to last another 10 years this way.

    • Re:Actually, it *is* Microsoft's fault. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MojoRilla ( 591502 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @01:00PM (#42217513)
      I was asked about porting a major live video application to the Surface recently. The Surface doesn't support flash in web views inside apps. It doesn't support HLS (without a third party library). They stubbornly insist that Silverlight and VC1 are still relevant. My answer to the request was, well, sure, but it will require a new encode farm, and rebuilding the app from the ground up. Which is basically a no-go.

      Microsoft is very late to the party. Two other operating systems are there first, have far more users, and are generally more compatible with standards. Microsoft is late to the party, and clinging to all of their old proprietary baggage. And they wonder why they are losing.

      • Re:Actually, it *is* Microsoft's fault. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @01:24PM (#42217807) Journal

        I wouldn't even say Redmond is losing at this point. They're not even in the race. You can hear it in the shills that post around here, where the latest explanation is that Microsoft isn't going after the iOS and Android market share, that Windows RT and Surface are so incredibly advanced and superior that they're going to make their own market.

        It's like they've hired Baghdad Bob to do the marketing.

    • I would agree with you, but the United States govt. (Dems, Repbubs, Congress, Senate, both Presidents) have shown that a company can be too big to fail, and will actively give them money to make sure they don't. I figure that Microsoft is now in that category. Even if the US wouldn't bail them out, I figure the EU probably would, but I'm not as conversant if they are still primarily using Microsoft products like the US govt/companies/schools/regular people.

  • No trial version (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Missing.Matter ( 1845576 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:51PM (#42217387)
    Gamers on Windows are used to having a trial version. Honestly, if there isn't a trial version I just pass right over it. I've been burned by shitty apps time and time again, I won't risk the money just to find out it's terrible. I've certainly bought plenty of games after playing the trial version, so perhaps they'd see some more sales if they added that feature.

    They should also think about porting to Windows 8.... no idea why the limited their app to only Windows RT, as the market share is so small right now.

  • Wow, that's great? (Score:3)

    by h4rr4r ( 612664 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:51PM (#42217391)

    He is mad about this?
    To get that much money every WindowsRT user must have bought it.

  • Won't promote RT apps? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew.gmail@com> on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:55PM (#42217439) Homepage Journal

    Microsoft is selling tablets and phones that won't run traditional Windows apps, and can only run Windows RT apps. Microsoft is encouraging developers to make RT the standard for future Windows development, but for some reason they aren't willing to promote RT apps?

    Here is the problem. Most people have an Android or iOS device today. If there Android and iOS apps you really love, you probably already purchased them for those platforms (and perhaps for both if you jumped ship at some point).

    How many people are jumping at the bit to buy them again for another platform?

    What Microsoft really needs is killer new apps that take advantage of Windows in a unique way that aren't on Android or iOS. And I just don't see that happening. Windows RT is dead on arrival for a number of reasons (can't join a domain, can't run legacy Windows apps and doesn't offer anything new for future development).

  • The original blog post (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Anyone who caught my previous post might already know that we recently released Great Big War Game onto Windows RT. If you're one of the teeny tiny crowd of people who just bought one of these devices, you can find one of the very small number of âoeproperâ games right here: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/great-big-war-game/30f26b23-aa92-4fed-9273-099de3069616 [microsoft.com]

    A week after release we have made the princely sum of £52 in sales. That's not a typo. And despite this, and the fact tha

  • Since when are developers entitled to customers? (Score:4)

    by detain ( 687995 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @01:26PM (#42217825) Homepage
    I must be doing something wrong or missed a very important memo. I find it hard enough to get people using my open source software let alone paying for it, and this guy is clearly under the impression he is entitled to a steady instantly large flow of income from his first platform release.
  • I just bought myself a copy for my Android tablet. Thanks, MS!

  • (Side note: Ten thousand pounds to port a game to a new platform? Wow.)

    Um, so, porting an application to a new platform that has nearly unmeasurable market penetration doesn't yield outrageous $PROFIT$ in the FIRST WEEK and the developer is surprised? I am far from a Microsoft fan, but there's something wrong with this story.

  • There is no way I believe the £10,000 dev costs number. Not a chance in hell. And right there with that lie whatever sympathy I might have had went away. It is way too easy a number to make up and then if challenged on it make up even more lies, or half-truths at best, to cover the lie.

    Given the immediate backpeddle once MS called and likely paid him off, and I wonder what that actual number was, the story is clearly not about the dev here.

    Rather, as most of us who are/were not fanboys/paid shills

    • Re:Liars, damn liars, and made up figures. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by artfulshrapnel ( 1893096 ) on Friday December 07, 2012 @02:51PM (#42218989)

      £10,000 is actually pretty reasonable. Assuming he's got... say... two programmers on staff, and they're good enough to demand industry standard wages? That's about 1-2 months of development and debugging, plus the costs of dev kits, testers, and software licenses.

      As near as I can tell, the big issue is that RT can't run the object oriented code favored by Android and iOS. Result is that large portions of any program would have to be completely refactored instead of simply converted and debugged.

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