While I'm obsessed with the minutiae of the App Store, there is another show in town.
Google is slowly improving its Android Market, and while it's yet to demonstrate it's a viable channel for game developers, as more devices are released and cross-platform technologies improve porting, hopefully it will come into play during 2010.
To that extent, the latest estimate of sales figures from market research company FADE make for interesting, if slightly depressing, reading.
It reckons the combined impact of US operator Sprint's release of the HTC Hero, combined with the Android 1.6 OS update, resulted in a 53 percent improvement in gross revenues in October compared to September.
However it lists the top grossing five games of the month as:
1. Robo Defense (Lupis Labs Software), 7,600 downloads at $2.99
2. Farm Frenzy (HeroCraft), 4,070 downloads at $4.77
3. Jewellust (Smartpix Games), 3,856 downloads at $2.95
4. Devily Huntress (Smartpix Games), 1,920 downloads at $2.95
5. Baseball Superstars 2009 (Gamevil), 838 downloads at $5.95
Hardly a lot of cash.
You can see the full breakdown of the top 10 games plus an estimate of how the sales figures breakdown graphically in terms of the 175 titles FADE tracks on VGChart.
Indeed, FADE reckons that, in total, the Android games market in 2009 will be worth a mere $1.75 million.
Still, at least that means the growth numbers will remain eye-catchingly high for a while.
The launch of Verizon's Droid on 6th November is expected to boost November sales by 50 percent.
For the record however, we should point out that FADE says it generates its sales data based on download ranges provided by the Android marketplace, user ratings on products, polls by Android users, and other proprietary means so it's by no means an official source.
[source: VGChart]
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Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
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