Is there any more news following Google’s I/O announcement for the archive storage on the marketplace? My understanding was we could host downloadable content with them for our apps, but I can’t see any new info.
They haven’t released that feature yet, its still in beta supposedly.
Blast, going to run out of space soon. D=
You can easily overcome it:
- Get Android Pro
- Make every scene beside the initial loader and downloader a streamed scene and export it
- Use unity 3.4s WWW.LoadFromCacheOrDownload to load it
thats how all other games basically work. EA has not released many games that don’t start up as “downloader” on the first run for example, same for chillingos 3D games
You forgot step 4 dreamora:
- Maintain a server hosting the data for the rest of your product’s lifespan.
This may or may not be something that’s practical for your business. In my opinion, Google is already taking ~32% of my revenue and providing little in return. The least they can do is host our data.
I left that out for 3 reasons actually:
-
Its a matter of finish the project or not finish it at all. Also the effort here goes towards zero normally as the hoster is the one doing the maintenance and the host is required anyway for the page etc. I know it still costs you a day or two to get it all working at worst, but its nothing ground breaking or crucially complex. Doing WWW-PHP driven highscores is significantly more complex and thats trivial already.
-
its not for the rest of lifetime, only until Google has finally fixed the problem. You are only bridging a gap that otherwise would be deal breaking.
-
If you use IAP then you gonna need that anyway for the additional content so the extra effort can actually be “nil” if the workflow is IAP opted anyway.
The only part that can be longterm problematic is if you are successful and need to host it in the cloud cause regular hosting paths no longer offer the required load stability and “overflood protection redundancy” and thats where google indeed need to chime in due to the costs to do their job.
In the end, google started later than iOS and didn’t make use of the cloud they had, starting with an OS with a laughable marketplace thats still laughable and won’t change away from laughable until they get to the same base requirements as WP7 and IOS: Device has 8GB Internal at least or can get lost right away - required to allow such large wifi driven singular downloads as on those two work at all (the SD install is a combersome workaround for a problem they caused themself with the attract-every-trash-device spitter approach)
Its interesting to see that google takes 32% again. I’ve nothing up there myself at all anymore so I can’t comment on it first hand but I know that last year they took a mere 3% (google checkout fees I think) only for the transactions, so it seems they fixed that hole again then? Or did they invoice the other 27% somewhere else in addition?
Google takes 30% immediately at the time of purchase just like Apple, and then google checkout takes another percentage from your monthly payout based on the revenue for that period. They have different brackets, and the higher your are, the lower percentage they take, it’s something like 1.5-3%.
Hosting the data yourself certainly is an option, I just think Google should actually do something to earn their 30+%. Their solution is now months past its alleged release date, and is merely a band-aid on the underlying problem - as you said, tiny internal storage on every device, and their screwy download cache which must exist on the tiny internal storage. This is the core problem, and isn’t going away. Therefore, I think it would be wise to assume that whatever solution you go with is not a temporary one while you wait on Google to get their act together, because they may just not.
I was aware of this solution but as MikaMobile pointed out it can become quite costly and just not worth while.
If your game does not need it to be as you require it to be, yes its not worth it.
But if its a do or die condition for the project, it at least to me loses any relevance “whats worth it or not” after I wasted time on bringing it to Android. Such a decision then has to be made before the project is even started for Android or has to be pulled through if there is no hard fact upon which its to expect that it will be a definite lose.
Its not great, but its a matter of going there or not going there and all were aware of the limitation long time ago so one can’t blame Google for your project now needing the solution, only for having a store that sucks.
Google announced that they would allows developers to host content with them months ago, so the argument “you knew what you were getting into” is irrelevant.