Porting more easy for the Russian market
If you think porting for the EU and US is a problem, think again… Some market are known to have huge loads of illegal mobile phones which are direct copies of big handset vendors like Nokia and Motorola. Russia is one of this markets where in 2005 90% of the mobile phones where cheap copies. This means that only 10% of the market had devices we all know. Alexander Onishchuk from Ratek announced the share of illegal phones in Russia to have seen a dramatic decline in market share. This year, mobile phones have dropped back to a 10-20% market share which makes the market much more attractive for mobile gaming services and the campaign of the law enforcement bodies in Russia is finally paying off. Please note the comments from Reaxion to the claims of Alexander Onishchuk below.
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Hello. I'm sorry, but this is very wrong information. I'm VP of Development for Reaxion, developer and publisher of mobile games and our development center is in Moscow, Russia, so I know the situation with Russian market very well. Believe me it's pretty much the same as in Europe. The only differences are greater variety of models (mostly because handsets are not sold by carriers, but rather by independent companies) and bigger market share (than in Europe) for 2nd tier handset manufacturers (like Sagem, Voxtel, Huawei etc). However, most of the handsets are the same Nokia's, Motorola's, Samsung's and Sony-Ericsson's as in Europe. Yes, there are some 'copycat' phones from unknown vendors from "the middle of nowhere in China", but they are not so common and you won't find them in any big city, they maybe popular only across country-side people, who need cheapest and simplest handsets mostly for emergency calls. So, any mobile developer who wants to port its games for Russian market should take care of the same old Nokia S60 and S40, Motorola triplets, RAZR-family, Sony-Ericsson's K, Я and W series and Samsungs and LG's.