So far, I've had a lot of headaches being a 1-man show trying to make something cross-platform. I know it can be done, evidenced by some great projects out there; it seems daunting, though. How have you fared in this arena?
It depends how complex your project is and what level of devices you're targeting. If you're doing something with simple graphics and interactions, it's generally no problem at all. However, if you're doing something more complex, it can get a bit tricky.
So far, getting my game to work on both desktop and touch devices hasn't been all that difficult. While it was somewhat more difficult than I expected (partially because I want to do some relatively complex touch interactions), it wasn't all that hard. It mainly required learning how to use the touch for ID expression and learning about things like overdraw and how to optimize for the weaker GPU hardware in mobile devices.
Excellent points, m'lady. From a lot of articles, there seems to be a feeling that there's still a 'gold rush' in mobile, but I think your perspective here might be closer to reality.
Actually, I'm male, my avatar is just of one of my game's main characters, sorry for the confusion. Basically what I get from articles and other developers is there is money but it's hard to get and most devs don't succeed at doing so because of insane competition of hundreds of new apps every day. One of the most important lessons I've read is to not to depend on simply being on the app store as a form of advertising. That only works if you get featured by apple or get on the top seller lists, which will most likely only happen if you advertise elsewhere.
I was wondering about how big an impact something like OUYA or Gamestick is going to make on HTML5 projects. One of my concerns there is close to what you mentioned: what happens when all those android games get ported over by their developers? It can't be too much of a stretch to tweak it for OUYA, for example. Is it going to be another case of a super-saturated market like mobile now?
That depends how successful and lucrative those markets turn out to be. Where there is gold, you'll find people, lots of people, trying to get it.
I read somewhere that iOS has something like 270 million devices out there. My guess is there will be way more competition at the start than iOS had at first because of the ease of porting games that are already on android to them, but way less than if you released for android phones/tablets because most of the games on android won't be coded to work with the controllers of these new platforms, meaning less competition than if you released on Google play.
Also, piracy as I hear is completely rampant on android, and even those who don't pirate are less prone to pay for things, and it doesn't help matters that users can buy something, return it and get a refund yet still keep the app. I don't know if the new android consoles will help to mitigate those factors or not.
What about mobile web gaming? Where does that fit into the picture with all this?
The problem with mobile web gaming is monetization. With an app store, the company already has your credit card information, so it's a very easy process to buy something and people feel safe about it. On the web, people have to give credit card information to a company they're generally not familiar with, and as such people are far more reluctant to do so. There's in game ads, but those generally pay a pittance. There's also marketjs, but I'm not sure exactly how lucrative that can be.