Amazon?
I recently asked on Twitter what people's thoughts were about releasing an Android version of Zombieville 2 exclusively through Amazon's app store, rather than Google's android market.
The reason I was considering this is simple - the official android market is a hassle. I talked about this earlier this year, and it hasn't gotten any better. The market continues to be plagued by random technical problems, such as orders failing to execute, downloads failing for no reason, bogus error messages about insufficient space to install, or invalid package signing, and so on. I also have the pleasure of having to process refunds for people who want to transfer their purchase to a different google account, or had their phone stolen and misused, or had their 4-year-old buy a game accidentally, and so on.
As a small developer, I'd rather be spending my time making cool games, instead of explaining to the 1000th person that their order failed because of a bug in the google market. For most android users these issues never crop up - it only seems to represent a small percentage of our buyers, but its enough to generate a part time job's worth of e-mail.
Like Apple's store, Amazon handles all technical and billing issues, which made me think "hey, why not just release on Amazon, and punt that responsibility?" Well, there's a pretty serious downside to that proposition. To put it bluntly, Amazon App Store sales have thus far represented a meaningless percentage of our revenue - less than 1% of our income for this year. This is no doubt due to the fact that their store requires a separate download, isn't pre-installed on any devices besides the Kindle Fire (as far as I know), or available internationally. And the release of the Kindle Fire hasn't exactly... set our sales on fire? Since the introduction of the device, sales of Battleheart on Amazon haven't improved appreciably. Combine this with a great deal of "nooooo!" from Twitter and, well, it seems unlikely we'll go that route.
