In a recent interview in Mobile Entertainment the CEO of Glu, Greg Ballard, claims that they made 25.000 versions of their Transformers mobile phone game. Wow, that’s scary!
We all know that fragmentation is a major hurdle for mobile application development, but this has to be a world record! How did they end up with that number of versions? While there is a large number of handsets out there, people don’t carry 25.000 different phone models.
Glu is a games developer and they distribute their games through more than 150 operators and distribution partners in 65 countries. The games are localized to several languages and many of these operators demand small adjustments in order to carry the game. Even accounting for this, Glu probably creates 50+ versions for each language.
(If you want to read the interview, you have to download the Print Edition of Mobile Entertainment here.)
