I’d be very grateful if you can advice us on what platform to target. We are a small group of designers / developers with a clear idea of the 2D game we want to make. We want to focus on the mobile device market, but I’m not sure if we should choose Android or iOS.
From what I’ve been reading Android would have a more expensive investment as right now it requires the PRO version of Unity plus the Android license.
Android : 1500 USD +1500 USD = 3000
Developing for an iphone or an ipad from what I’ve read would require a minial investment of 400 USD for the basic license. But you have to go through the process of becoming an apple developer which isnt THAT easy. The bad side of this also is that we do not have any mac computers, so that would also require an investment.
Any help on this would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.
Unity Android is the same price as iOS with the release of Unity 3.3 this week, so the same $400 per seat
But keep in mind that android has a much higher hardware and screen resolution fragmentation (including tablets there are 6+ resolutions presently on android, while iOS has 3), which basically forces you to buy more devices to test reasonably.
iOS dev on the other hand requires that you are on macs, you can’t do any iOS dev from Windows at all for example.
On android, without pro, you on the other hand are rather limited because the max application size for the android market place is ~43mb (thats not for 3G download but in total, where as apples appstore has no limit), so without pro you have no asset bundles and can’t download the rest of the content should you exceed that
A pro on android, given you have the $700 to test on it, is that you can target the Xperia Play
I would say make it more dependent on the type of user you want to target and what hardware you have already, to reduce the startup costs to invest in a more polished product. upon this success you then can expand to the other platform you are hardware wise not up to yet.
Becoming an iOS dev is trivial at least if you don’t do it for a registred business but even then its not that complex actually either, it just takes longer to be processed. but you can none the less start prototyping and working on the first half of your game with the unity remote.
Wow… that was a detailed explanation thanks! I would be tempted to purchase the new Unity Adroid for 400 USD, but from what you are saying it’s quite limited without the assets bundles right?
I’d probarbly go with iOS but that will require quite a bit of investment on mac computers and devices to test on also… Hmmmmm