Porting to Android pays off nicely for another indie dev

Independent developer Spaces of Play released its action-puzzle game Spirits onto the iPad in 2010. Since then, it's been ported to a number of different platforms, with varying commercial success. In a new blog post, "Spirits by the Numbers", Spaces of Play provides readers with a specific breakdown of its revenue-to-date, and challenges some assumptions. Spirits drew the bulk of its sales from its native iPad market (28.3 percent), with an additional 10.5 percent from iPhone sales. More significantly, its second largest market is Google Play, with 21.2 percent of sales. "The saying that Android is not worth developing for compared to iOS does not seem to be true anymore," says Spaces of Play. Spaces of Play isn't the only indie mobile developer who's seen Android success. Terry Canavagh's Super Hexagon performed well, Bertil Horberg's Gunman Clive sold far better on the Google Play store than on iOS and Capy's Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was strong on Android out of the gate. For Spirits, Steam sales accounted for only approximately 11 percent of Spirits' revenue. "Steam is a tale others have told before: Sale promotions make the majority of the revenue. However, nowadays a sale without any kind of feature can go very much unnoticed in the vast sea of great (indie) games available," says Spaces of Play. "It’s great to have your game on Steam to reach core gamers, but with 11.4 percent of the revenue it was not make-or-break for us." Overall, the game has generated roughly $366,000 to date, after platform-holder takes. "With our revenue being spread relatively evenly among different platforms, going multiplatform was a strategy that worked well for us," says Spaces of Play. "The distribution of revenue amongst platforms looks different for every game, but we hope that sharing our numbers will give you at least one data point that might help you decide which platforms you should put your effort into."