I read earlier in one of these posts where someone suggested selling games through web portals as well as on the iPhone. I’ve only used Unity to develope for the iPhone so far, but am interested in how easily I can port some of my iphone games over to the web player.
But more imporatantly, I’m curious how much money can you make by doing this? How much do these web portals pay to use your game? How does that structure work? Anyone with experience on using these portals? And which portals?
I’ve done both an iphone to web port and a web to iphone port. A few things to know about cross-platform games:
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The game has to be designed with this in mind at the start, especially when it comes to controls. Doing an iphone game and then deciding you want to port it to web can be a logistical nightmare when you realize a keyboard doesn’t have an accelerometer.
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In my personal experience, going from iphone to web is a lot easier than going from web to iphone. Partly because computers have more beefy hardware than the iphone, and partly because iphone uses older versions of some scripting languages. Using a typed variable in web works while using an untyped variable in iphone does not.
The iphone uses the same current scripting language as the desktop actually.
Its the runtime features that are reduced for size and performance reasons
JS: dynamic typing is deactivated. But if you work with #pragma strict that is only a small step
C#: You only have .NET 1.1, not 2.0+
I’m more interested in finding out if it’s worth porting over to web players and working with those portals? What’s the pay out like compared to working with iTunes?
if you land a blockbuster on the iphone, it will be significantly higher.
otherwise you won’t earn much more than a few hundred bucks per month on the iphone at best.
for portals, it really depends on various things, especially if they accept unity webplayers at all