Nokia Lumia impact and Alpha 1.7 progress

My plan is to submit Alpha 1.7 over the weekend. The new animal is ready, but I still need to do some testing how hard it is to kill it (or get killed by it) on the phone. Today I was improving water so that the new animated flow carries the player, animals and pickables along with it.

And now something completely different. Survivalcraft has a basic analytics module that collects numbers of new game installations and errors encountered during game execution. The errors have not been very useful so far, but what I can see are models of the phones used by Survivalcraft players. And it’s especially interesting when you divide the data by continent. Here’s Europe:

Sessions of Survivalcraft by phone model in Europe

You can immediately see the impact that Nokia Lumia 800 has made. It raced past all other phone models and accounts for 31% of all sessions, which is as much as 2 best competitors together. And it has only been on the market for 3 months, as opposed to over a year for all 1st gen phones. This is an awesome sales performance. In comparison, another 2nd gen phone, HTC Titan has more down to the earth results with 13%. This is still respectable when you take into account the short period it’s been in the market. What is surprising are poor results of Lumia 710. Maybe it wasn’t cheap enough and sales were cannibalized by Lumia 800. Or, more likely, people don’t want yet another mainstream WP7 device. They want the best. Microsoft take note :-)

Here’s the data from North America (US + Canada):

Sessions of Survivalcraft by phone model in US and Canada

Lumia 800 is not available for sale in North America yet, and so the old guard of 1st gen phones leads the pack: Samsung Focus and HTC HD7. But the new 2nd gen Samsung Focus Flash is making long strides, and will likely overtake them soon. Interestingly, Nokia Lumia 710 which has been available in US for some time is not selling well and accounts for less than 1% of sessions. Maybe people don’t like mainstream phones. They want top models only. Or, simply, people in the US are not so in awe of Nokia as Europeans are. It will be interesting to see what happens when Lumia 800 and especially 900 hit the market.

Concluding, it seems that something is moving in Windows Phone world. Despite the short time since they were introduced, 2nd gen phones account for almost 50% of the market already, especially in Europe where phenomenal Nokia Lumia 800 has destroyed the competition. Keep going WP7!