Why Ticket to Ride Isn’t Coming to Android

Ben Kuchera, interviewing the CEO of Days of Wonder:

Hautemont joked that Google created a platform so open that it’s barely a platform anymore. The physical versions of Ticket to Ride are a specific size, and it takes a non-trivial amount of work to make that game fit well on digital devices with comparatively small screens. The good news is that with the iOS platform you need only aim for two screen sizes to hit 100 percent of all devices.

Things are not nearly as simple when you look at Android as a whole. “When you take [a game] to a platform that has dozens of different form factors, screen ratios, and so on, the work is not quite as simple. The question for us, it’s not that I don’t like Android… the question is how could we do that in a way that is satisfactory, and that’s when things start falling apart.” Everyone wants a version of Ticket to Ride that plays at least as well as the iPhone or iPad version, and they want it to run perfectly on their own phone or tablet, running their own version of Android. Trying to deliver the quality Days of Wonder is known for across all the variables of Android is simply cost prohibitive, and Hautemont has no interest in lazy ports.

Besides, there’s also the issue of customers paying for the game.

The Android ecosystem simply makes things too hard for both developers and users.

There’s something to be said for simplicity.

3 comments on “Why Ticket to Ride Isn’t Coming to Android

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  1. Having just dealt with the different resolutions for a somewhat simple app (WordPress for Android), I can subscribe to this. It’s an extensive amount of work just going into making the graphics look good on any size screen – then add different DPIs. Same problem for the UI elements, you have to make everything scale up and down in a logical way, but it’s not the web and most values are absolute. All in all it just seems as if they’re creating a ton of overhead.

  2. A lot of truth there. And they keep adding new devices with different layouts every 3 months, hard to keep up with.

  3. Well then, I guess this was just a load of Malarky. They’ve just released it on Android….

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