I can confirm this. I worked for a major game publisher at the time, and MSFT threw significant money at us to port iOS/Android titles to Windows Phone. I think their gamble was once our - and the hundreds of other developers' - titles were on their platform, users would migrate to it. We'd then hopefully see promising numbers and decide to update the titles on our own accord, keeping them in sync with iOS/Android.
Unfortunately for MSFT, that didn't happen. Aside from their hefty payment to get the 1.0 out, after that there was zero incentive to update as often as iOS/Android (platforms that actually brought in revenue) so after the initial release the titles stagnated.
They did offer payment for additional point updates, but these were separate contracts that would take months to sign-off (MSFT moved VERY slow), and in the fast-moving mobile world, the WP port gathered dust.
Xbox Live support which sounded like a great idea at the time and edge over the other platforms, turned out to be a nightmare. Rather than come up with a mobile-specific review policy, we had to go through the same approval process as Xbox console publishers do to get the titles signed off, and this took many weeks or months of tedious back and forth with their review team who didn't 'get' mobile. Titles would occasionally get rejected for reasons irrelevant to mobile, and then take weeks to be resolved.
Ultimately, the few Windows users we did have (IIRC our metrics showed a few thousand DAU on our major titles vs. iOS/Android in the low millions) became frustrated because Windows Phone versions lagged significantly behind iOS/Android releases (which were in sync) and had less features.
Unfortunately for MSFT, that didn't happen. Aside from their hefty payment to get the 1.0 out, after that there was zero incentive to update as often as iOS/Android (platforms that actually brought in revenue) so after the initial release the titles stagnated.
They did offer payment for additional point updates, but these were separate contracts that would take months to sign-off (MSFT moved VERY slow), and in the fast-moving mobile world, the WP port gathered dust.
Xbox Live support which sounded like a great idea at the time and edge over the other platforms, turned out to be a nightmare. Rather than come up with a mobile-specific review policy, we had to go through the same approval process as Xbox console publishers do to get the titles signed off, and this took many weeks or months of tedious back and forth with their review team who didn't 'get' mobile. Titles would occasionally get rejected for reasons irrelevant to mobile, and then take weeks to be resolved.
Ultimately, the few Windows users we did have (IIRC our metrics showed a few thousand DAU on our major titles vs. iOS/Android in the low millions) became frustrated because Windows Phone versions lagged significantly behind iOS/Android releases (which were in sync) and had less features.