The Case of Ubisoft's AC Pirates: How Does WP Development Work?

[coip]

I know nothing about developing for mobile phones, but I've become intrigued lately by the case of Ubisoft's recent Xbox on WP game, Assassin's Creed: Pirates. The game launched last month but was immediately found to have all sorts of display and performance problems, but only on some devices (e.g. didn't work on the Lumia 1520 but worked fine on the Lumia 928). The game got pulled from the store for those devices it didn't work on, and then five weeks later Ubisoft re-launched it with an update. Now it seems to work fine on some devices it didn't work on before (e.g. Lumia 1520) but continues to not work on other devices (e.g. Lumia Icon).

Is this typical for WP development? Developers have to specifically tailor an app's or game's code for each device that will run it? That sounds like a nightmare, especially for an ecosystem like Android with hundreds of different phones. Or is this an anomaly, due to some ineptitude on Ubisoft's part? What exactly is going on here that AC Pirates would work on some phones but not others even though they have similar specs?

 

[James8561]

it's definitely an anomaly.
we don't have much fragmentation like android.

 

[coip]

it's definitely an anomaly.
we don't have much fragmentation like android.

Okay, so why? What went wrong? Ubisoft is a major developer with well qualified programmers. So, what are they doing wrong that makes the game work on some devices and not on others? I assumed they just had to write a generic app and then it would work on any device that matches those specifications (e.g. 'has at least 1GB of RAM), because the OS would do the work of making it run on each phone. But I don't know anything about programming, so I was just curious what was going on here.

 

[vmnoodle71]

Assassins creed series had horrible ports on PC's ;C