Speaking in an interview with Now Gamer, id Software co-founder John Carmack made several statements on the development of games for iPhone vs. Android. When asked, “With Rage HD on iOS do you see yourself ever working on Android?,” Carmack responded, “Every six months I’d take a look at the scope of the Android, and decide if it was time to start really looking at it.” He continued, “At the last Quakecon I took a show of hands poll, and it was interesting to see how almost as many people there had an Android device as an iOS device.
But when I asked how many people had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android store, there was a big difference. You’re just not making money in the Android space as you are in the iOS space.”
He added, “We made more money than people may expect on the Doom RPG stuff. It’s just fun to develop on iOS.
We’d show people what we were working on and they’d go ‘Oh, when are you going to ship that? And I’d say “next month” and they’d go ‘Aww, I wanna work on an iPhone title.’ It’s hard to make a rational business decision to say I want to take resources from something else and put them on this. We did actually hire a person to be our Android guy, but it looks like he’s going to get stuck on iOS development!” Id has released several games for iOS devices, including ports of its classic titles Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, as well as the aforementioned Rage HD.
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