Lili Release Teaser Trailer

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hal

Dictator
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Remember Lee Perry, formerly of Epic Games? He and six others from Epic set out for greener pastures with a long term UE3 license, grabbed the cat and commenced making Lili in their new BitMonster studio. The teaser trailer for that is out now:

The title will be available in the App Store on September 21st. Lili is a quirky adventure RPG hybrid with stunning visuals, silky-smooth graphics and a cinematic storyline, made possible with the new iPod touch dual-core A5 chip with up to 2 times the processing performance and up to 7 times the graphic power of the previous generation all on the brilliant 4" Retina display. Using Epic's Unreal Engine 3, Lili will easily be one of the most visually-stunning games available on iOS.
 

Sir_Brizz

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Me neither because Epic occasionally joins stupid bandwagons instead of making a crapload of money.
 

QAPete

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They've got a really small team there at BitMonster (this isn't Epic, Brizz), and this will be their first release. I can't see that they'd have the resources to both do a really great job on the iOS version and make and support an Android version as well.

For the record, the walled garden of iOS is a FAR more lucrative marketplace for developers than Android, despite the greater number of Android OSes in play out there. Distimo, a mobile consulting firm, estimates that the Apple App store generates $5.4M/day for the 200 top-grossing apps while Google generates just $679K for their top-200 grossing apps. That is almost a 8:1 revenue ratio.

Flurry Analytics estimates that 7 of 10 develop for Apple’s iOS compared to Google’s Android. AppStoreHQ estimates there are over 43K Apple iOS developers and 10K Android developers. Why? Because iOS developers earn more. For the very same app, Flurry Analytics estimates that a developer will earn $1.00 on the Apple iOS version compared to $0.24 for the Google Android version. http://appleinsider.com/articles/11...0_more_revenue_than_android_counterparts.html

It's important for a small startup company like BitMonster to make some cheddar on their first game or two, before even considering expanding on to other platforms. Hopefully Lili will get some marketing/advertising/buzz from Epic and the Unreal Engine community, get some good reviews in the App Store. and do just that on iOS. After that, well, who knows?
 

Sir_Brizz

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My problem is really two fold:

1) There is no game on Android that is of the same quality as Infinity Blade. It's just a reality. There are some great games there, but I think there is still demand for much higher quality overall.

2) Epic creates an engine that it is in their best interest to show how versatile it is. There is no technical reason that Infinity Blade is not on Android. Even Trendy made Dungeon Defenders work on all the major platforms out there. Showing how little work it takes to port games from one platform to another using UE3 seems like an extremely lucrative position to take.

And, let's not fool ourselves, these guys are all from Epic. They are doing iOS because Epic did iOS and they think it will work. I like and respect Lee Perry and I think he does a great job and I have no doubt that Lili will be a great game. But I also know he is going to come into this with the same biases Epic had as a company. I could hope that he wouldn't, but it's part of the culture and there is really nothing intrinsically wrong with it.

Out of all those people that develop for iOS, how many of them make enough money to live off of that are not massive enterprises with plenty of money to do whatever they want and advertise the crap out of their product off of the App Store? I would hazard a guess that the answer is "not many". The top 200 games likely represent almost all of the income from the App Store on a daily basis. Considering that is more than likely populated by less than 100 companies selling two or more apps, that is not a great prospect. All mobile development is that way. It's not even fair to compare the ratios. Releasing on iOS can be more lucrative if you're extremely lucky, but for most people it's probably equally lucrative or they just get entirely lost in the noise.

On a side note, Rovio has said they make far more money off of ad revenue from Angry Birds on Android than they have ever made off of the iOS versions of Angry Birds. That is telling another incredible story.
 

Arnox

UT99/2004 Mod Crazy
Mar 26, 2009
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That tropical setting seriously reminds me of Far Cry 3. Obviously, it won't play anything like though.

... I can't freaking wait for FC3.