I was hoping to take advantage of Microsoft pubCenter Ads on Windows Phone 7 for my XNA game. But apparently you have to be a US based developer at the moment.
This is a shame, because the way things seem to be going is you give your game away for free and make money from advertising revenue. I have heard of lots of indie game developers making money this way. However, I haven’t heard many success stories about indies making money from selling their app – although surely those stories must exist.
Your average phone user probably seeks out the free apps because they know that they are going to get access to the full game – with a few ads popping up here and there. Most users can live with that.
It seems to me that developers in other parts of the world are a a major disadvantage. How do they compete with US developers who can monetise their apps through advertising?
We will just have to hope Microsoft allows UK developers to monetise their Windows Phone 7 apps using PubCenter sooner rather than later.