The price gap came for those reasons and also because of the additional development costs for a platform that we knew was unlikely to generate a lot of sales for us. In an ideal world we would price the game the same everywhere but the reality is that each market is very different and will support differing price levels and sales volumes. Pricing was one of the most difficult decisions we faced. Apple are definitely more hands off but if they take an interest in what you are doing then they will also keep an eye on you and track how things are going. Nintendo Europe in particular were great to us and were always there to help in any way that they could. With respect to interacting with the publishers, we found both Nintendo and Apple to be approachable. The console manufacturer wants to protect their brand and their name, and so they are much more rigorous and careful about what they let through. On Wii U it's still very much how consoles have always been. If there's defects then it's up to you to interact with customers directly to fix them. They do basic quality checking and some conformance testing when you submit your game but not much. If there's an issue in your game or your app then it's your responsibility. Looking at submissions, on iOS Apple leaves almost everything down to the developer. How would you summarise the key differences between publishing on iOS and Wii U, then? Having come from iOS where submission is straightforward and quick, Nintendo's procedures (like all of the console makers) are overly bureaucratic and error prone and geared more towards disc-based games than digital games. We lost way more time than we expected getting the game through the various age rating agencies around the world, as well as to Nintendo's lot check procedures which proved to be very time consuming. I think this probably fooled us into thinking that we were most of the way there, but I should have known better having worked on console before. This is because we had shown the game at Pax Prime on Wii U. We already had a mostly finished version of Tengami by the time the iOS version was finished. For a while it was hard to get focused clearly on the Wii U version.Ĭan you talk a little about the process in Spring / Summer of completing the Wii U version? Were there any particular challenges in development, submission etc? I think also we were all suffering from burnout to varying degrees, having worked so hard to get the game finished. It took more of our time than we anticipated and prevented us getting on with the Wii U version as quickly as we would have liked. Once it arrived on iOS, how much of your time (in the initial month or two) was on post-launch activities, and how much focus was on the Wii U version?Īt least for the first couple of months it was almost entirely post-launch activities: promoting the game, doing interviews, adding additional features and fixing any issues. We were of course also incredibly excited to see how the game was received by players. I wasn't at all confident that there wasn't a serious bug in there somewhere, so it was a very nervy time waiting to see if any issues came up. I think we put together the final build at 5am in the morning before doing some final testing and then uploading it to the App Store. While we all would have preferred not to crunch it was unavoidable as we had committed to a date with Apple for the release and we didn't want to blow any chances we might have of getting featured.

The period prior to the iOS release was crazy and very much a 'crunch' period.

Can you talk about the early weeks building up to the iOS release? Was it a 'crunch' period?Ģ014 has been a huge year for us as it saw the release of our very first game Tengami at first on iOS in February and then later in the year on Wii U. 2014 has clearly been a big year for you.

Tengami dog