I bought the game last year, and this article got me to thinking. I cannot recall when I last saw an update in the market for it. So, I pulled up AppBrain page for it, and see updates were coming in from May to July 2011. Then there has been nothing since. So, I have to wonder how many tweaks to the shaders and whatever they say they really did? I mean, they gave up on the game a long time ago. It hit 50k purchases in August, so there's $150,000 in sales made. Google takes what, 30%? So that's $105,000 minimum.
I know I've seen some nasty comments in the user reviews on the market, so I pull up their page there. I see 4991 four or five star reviews, and 383 one to three star reviews. That's just 7% of the reviews are bad. That looks quite good to me. Looking at the recent ratings, there have been many of the 196 one-star reviews posted just in the last couple of days. Since March 1, people have been giving it one star for not having updates like IOS has (Did that version just get an update?), which is an understandable sentiment.
Now, that's considered a failure for small-time developers? They really put in more time/effort on this than to make it a losing venture?