How many Construct2 Developers in the USA

Hello

I talked with Ashley and he agreed to let me post this:

I work for Microsoft in the USA and specifically on Windows Phone 7. We have been very impressed with how well many Construct2 games work when loaded on a Windows Phone 7 browser and in addition the high quality we are seeing in terms of original games.

My question to you all is how many of you Scirra / Construct2 guys are based in the USA? If we could find a way to package up a Construct2 game perhaps using phonegap would you have interest in getting your game into the Windows Phone 7 marketplace?.

Ashley and his team are building a great product for building apps and I would like to connect with any of you who are in the USA to see if we can get more of this great content over to Windows Phone 7.

Please feel free to contact me direct at jodonnelatmicrosoft.com

thanks for reading

John O'Donnell

Microsoft USA

twitter.com/jodonnel

Now, things like this piss me off, pardon the language. Why is it that in today's day and age this ridiculous "in the USA" limit persists? There's world outside those borders.

I for one want to enter in WP Marketplace, but why is it that no one in Microsoft cares about a dumb Portuguese developer?

That's 2 of us Portuguese developers...

eyeliner Perhaps you should leave the "dumb" part out when you make your plea. :P

Im sure many of us in the US would be interested in that market.

The question is what are the pros and cons?

For example Apple takes a pretty big slice of the pie, and requires you to purchase the right to publish the app.

Also, this this thing with IE not adapting webgl is a bit annoying.

Does MS have any plans to work that out in a reasonable way?

I would point out that I am pleasantly surprised at IE's performance currently.

eyeliner - probably best not to get quite so riled up, but you have a point.

JonnyBritish - why is your question about US developers only?

My main concern is about performance. The technologies to improve performance on mobiles, like appmobi's directcanvas and cocoonjs only seem to have announced support for iOS and android. I want to make a mobile game, but the type of game I want to make will probably need the performance benefits they provide, as too low of a frame rate and it's simply too unresponsive. I've tried playing on iOS and android devices without them, and the framerate simply isn't high enough. I haven't had access to a win7 phone to try it, though.

If the performance is there, then yes I would be interested in win7 phones as a platform. Otherwise, I'm not so sure.

Thanks for reaching out to the community!

To those non-US developers, I wouldn't read any disrespect or disinterest into this. As a former software product manager, my guess is that John's asking about US developers because that is his assigned market, and he has little or no authority outside that. A program like he is suggesting has to start somewhere and if successful, it grows into other markets.

Anyway, I'm a US developer, and I would be interested.

Arima kittiewan

It should be obvious that for a tool like C2, there's developers in the whole world and segregating users like that hits a nerve that is not particularly pleasant.

I hope that US is John's assigned territory. I correct my posture, but if he works in MS and sees broad interested in here, he better be ready to point to the powers that be that there's a whole world outside US borders and profit to gain from it.

As an XBOX360 owner and being victim to the poor service our XBOX Live service has in Europe comparatively to the US, I should know better...

Unless you're talking about hiring, I can't make any sense of the "USA only" policy either. A lot of people in this forum either are from other countries or work with people from other countries.

If you intend to limit your market to the US alone, excluding everyone else (artists, designers, testers, localization people, marketers), you'll likely find very few people for your venture, even if you do find enough programmers.

I am certain you have valid reasons (I can think of a couple), but I'd like to know what they are so that we're better prepared for future opportunities.

Edit: Also, you're aware that spambots lurk these forums harvesting e-mails, right?

Fimbul eyeliner

It's not about segregating users. It's about profits, policies, legalities, so on and so forth... But it's never about segregating users. It does a company no good to segregate without reason. Your frustration is understandable, but it does no good to take it out on someone who can't control it.

john

I'm a US Construct user, and am working on a game that I intend to support mobile with. I can say that I'd definitely be interested in releasing any mobile games to Win7 marketplace, but I'd also have to echo the previous sentiment about Microsoft's support for WebGL. A drop in speed is always detrimental for any action games like platformers and racing games and so on. It'd be interesting to know how Microsoft plans to improve performance for that area of HTML5 gaming.

I also am wondering about the percentages and pricing and such. I don't have any apps in the Apple store, but I have a couple albums in iTunes and Apple likes to take a generous cut of the sales and they largely control the pricing. I was wondering if Microsoft's policies are available for public viewing or if that's a non-disclosure thing you can only know after submission to the Win7 store?

So yeah, top concerns for me are performance and store policies for our games.

I think it's safe to say we do appreciate your interest in our community and Ashley's great game creation kit!

Thank you Jonny for taking an interest in us. I find it very impressive that Microsoft a giant in the tech industry is interested in doing business with us Scirra / Construct2 guys. This just re-insures me that my decision to purchase Construct 2 was one of the best investments I ever made.

To answer your questions:

How many of you Scirra / Construct2 guys are based in the USA?

I am based in the USA.

If we could find a way to package up a Construct2 game perhaps using phonegap would you have interest in getting your game into the Windows Phone 7 marketplace?

Yes, most definitely!

Thanks again for taking the time to post here. You know that theirs not a lot of opportunity in the USA anymore. As a matter of fact there are about 17 million unemployed Americans that would jump at an opportunity like this.

Just to address some of the concerns in this thread:

• I know the US requirement is annoying, but it's just the way it is. Often US employees for legal reasons or others are tasked to do business only with others in the US. It may also be possible that they can help you out getting started with Windows Phone development, but on the condition that you're in the US. I agree they're missing out big time: US visitors are a minority of our overall traffic, so presumably also a minority of overall C2 developers. However, it's not our battle to fight, so for the time being I'm afraid this opportunity depends on where you live. On the other hand if you are a US citizen it may be an interesting opportunity for you.

• I know IE doesn't support WebGL, but currently we have disabled WebGL on all mobile devices in the C2 engine because our testing has shown it's either slower on mobile or causes bugs and crashes. It's still a work-in-progress on mobile really. So you're not losing any performance - no other mobiles are using WebGL.

IE for mobile is also the only mobile browser I'm aware of with a GPU accelerated canvas 2D natively in the browser. So you may get pretty good performance anyway.

I am in the US, and I am interested.

Hello Jonny. I am based in the US and I have a huge interest to get Construct2 Games onto Win7 phone.

I think this would be a huge step forward not just for Construct2, but also for Windows 7. I personally did not have a problem with XNA, and actually liked it, but the visual element that Construct gives is just a huge leg up over just lines of code.

And to everyone who is frustrated about the US segregation, it is highly unlikely that it is Jonny's call on the issue. If anything at least be happy that Microsoft took notice and is actively trying to expand your potential audience. Good things come with time.

C2 user in the US, interested!

I am in the US, and would be interested if you can manage to get phones to run HTML5 games at a reasonable level. Unfortunately, this has proved to be very difficult.