Gameloft scaling back Android investment

Mobile games publisher Gameloft has revealed that it has cut its spending on Android games due to poor sales, in contrast to the success the company is experiencing on iPhone.

"We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like ... many others," finance director Alexandre de Rochefort told an investment conference, according to Reuters.

"It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue."

In one sense, these comments aren't a surprise. Games firms in particular have been heavily critical of Google's Android Market, which is driving plenty of downloads of free games, but not so many paid titles.

However, cutting investment in Android could still turn out to be a rash decision. Google has already made some improvements to Android Market, separating paid and free apps to prevent the former from being buried by the latter.

Meanwhile, it's now easier to create native Android games, while the release of handsets like HTC's Hero and Motorola's Droid is rapidly increasing Android's reach.

You could argue that now is precisely the time to be increasing investment in Android games, rather than cutting it. Still, Gameloft's announcement should worry Google - it clearly has work to do to convince mobile games firms that its platform will pay off for them.

"We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android," said Rochefort. Downloads (and the resulting money) talks.

Story originally published on Mobile Entertainment