Well, they were targeting Android, and the apps were emulating ARM on x86, and they were going against a strong incumbent. Accounts on the web of this failure seem to bring up other failings as the main problems.
Well, apps tuned for performance and apps using native code have more than a little overlap. Even back then there were a lot of apps besides games that used native code for the hot code paths. But games of course are huge by themselves, and besides performance you need to have good power efficiency in running them.
