Unhappy Developer Pulls Popular Game from Amazon Appstore
The Amazon Appstore is a disaster. So says Bithack CEO Emil Romanus, explaining why he has decided to pull his game Apparatus from the third party apps market. Don’t be mistaken, the game was doing just fine for itself — Appartus reached the number three spot in Amazon’s rankings — but the Swedish development house’s distaste with Amazon’s way of running things has them shifting their focus to the Android Market.
Romanus details his complaints in a news post found on the Bithack site, taking issue with slow app review times and a lack of channels for easy communication between the developer and customers. Of chief concern is the inability to directly contact a customer or reply to a review in order to clear up any troubleshooting issues that may be leading to bad gaming experiences. In short, Romanus believes the Amazon Appstore is not set up for smaller, independent developers to succeed.
Customers who downloaded Apparatus from Amazon will need to buy the game again from the Android Market in order to receive future updates. The good news is Bithack will refund the cost to anyone buying the game a second time (if you paid full price the first time around — free downloads won’t be honored fro a refund). Amazon will no doubt continue to refine their appstore, though whether or not it can lure Bithack back into the fold is anybody’s guess.
[via Bithack]