The Success of Crossy Road and Monument Valley→

I’m always interested in learning how the App Store market is working out for indie developers and small studios. Over the last few days, we got a glimpse into the business of iOS games thanks to numbers and stats shared by the developers of two quality titles – Crossy Road and Monument Valley.

Crossy Road implements a freemium model and it has grossed over a million dollars with ads. The developers used video ads in an effective way:

“I played Disco Zoo and thought that video ads were a really good way to earn money without getting into people’s faces. We just needed to figure out a fun reason for players to watch them”. In the game, watching ads earns coins. Players can use coins to buy new characters that hop across the endless dangerous road in new and often hilarious ways. But it’s also possible to simply buy them with real money or just collect coins in the game.

Monument Valley, on the other hand, is an excellent premium game that allows players to download extra levels as additional purchases (the so-called paymium model). In a widely popular post, ustwo shared the numbers behind the game. Most notably:

  • 2.4M official sales, 1.7M of which on iOS
  • 575k upgrades to Forgotten Shores
  • $5.8M in revenue, 81.7% of which on iOS

The numbers, however, also include more specific and interesting stats such as the number of players who completed the game (lower than I expected) and sales by country. I find it illuminating to see the effects of Forgotten Shores and Christmas compared to winning an Apple Design Award or releasing the game on Android.

Crossy Road and Monument Valley are two profoundly different games. Monument Valley had a big budget (for an indie production), a moderately large team, and it reaped well-deserved rewards. Crossy Road uses freemium mechanics with a unique twist, respecting the user’s time and commitment to the game. In both cases, they are quality games, and two examples of the multifaceted (and crowded) App Store market.

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Connected: Mac Skills, iOS Skills, and Myke→

This week, the Europeans and Stephen discuss some follow-up then move on to some fake Blackberry news, smartwatch companion apps and RSS.

If you’ve been following my tweets about NewsBlur and RSS lately, this week’s Connected features an update on my ongoing experiment and a discussion about our RSS usage in the post-Reader era. You can listen to the episode here.

Sponsored by:

  • lynda.com: An easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn. Free 10-day trial.
  • Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
  • Squarespace: Start Here. Go Anywhere. Use code WORLD for 10% off
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Virtual: My Dad Is Mario→

This week’s episode of Virtual was recorded straight after Nintendo Direct on January 14th. Expect conversation about Majora’s Mask, amiibo, the new 3DS and so much more.

On yesterday’s Virtual, we talked about the Nintendo Direct announcements and discussed some games we’ve been playing lately. You can listen to the episode here.

Sponsored by:

  • Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
  • Squarespace: Start Here. Go Anywhere. Use code INSERTCOIN for 10% off
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Due 2 Review: Effective Reminders

Due has been around for a long time. Created by independent developer Lin Junjie (who later went on to launch Dispatch and Clips with Hon Cheng), Due was launched in late 2010 as a simple reminder app for iPhone to never forget the things you had to do. Over the years, Due expanded to more platforms and received an iOS 7 redesign, but, at its core, it remained a streamlined utility to set reminders and always complete them. With a combination of clever design and thoughtful snooze settings, Due ensured you’d never ignore an alert (or pretend it wasn’t important).

The original Due was, however, a product of simpler times. In five years, thousands of reminder and timer apps have been released on the App Store. As widely documented by the indie iOS dev community, it’s hard to survive in a market driven by a tendency to lower prices and to add features atop features. People’s workflows change (often, from modest to more advanced needs) but, unlike others, Junjie has shown remarkable restraint in changing how Due works. He’s an exception. I can’t think of any other 1.0 app that lasted this long.

Four years after the original Due (which I discovered thanks to John Gruber), Due 2 launches today with a completely redesigned interface and interactions updated for the modern era of iOS 8 and larger phones. And yet, in spite of its new look, Due 2 is still unmistakably Due – a testament to the developer’s deliberate efforts to make a specific type of app that doesn’t compromise its nature.

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An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media→

Danah Boyd makes an important point about Andrew Watts’ article on teenagers and social media:

Andrew’s depiction of his peers’ use of social media is a depiction of a segment of the population, notably the segment most like those in the tech industry. In other words, what the tech elite are seeing and sharing is what people like them would’ve been doing with social media X years ago. It resonates. But it is not a full portrait of today’s youth. And its uptake and interpretation by journalists and the tech elite whitewashes teens practices in deeply problematic ways.

Many (including myself) failed to mention that Watts’ article was only reflective of a segment of teenagers who use social networks in the US. Danah’s comments on Twitter and Ferguson are especially apt: some teenagers may not see the point of Twitter, but the network proved to be an essential information sharing tool for many citizens of Ferguson through the use of hashtags, photos, Vines, videos uploaded elsewhere, and more. Danah’s post is an important reminder and I recommend reading it.

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Apple Pay in Slow Fast Slow→

Studio Neat’s Dan Provost writes about how they integrated Apple Pay in the latest version of their iPhone app, Slow Fast Slow:

Integrating Apple Pay into the app wasn’t too difficult, but it wasn’t trivial, either. In a future post we will dive into the nuts and bolts of how we implemented Apple Pay. As far as we know, we are the first “indie” company to utilize it in an app.

We are excited to see how this integration affects sales. In theory, it is now much easier to purchase a Glif, so hopefully sales will trend upward, even as traffic to our site moves downward. We are also offering free shipping on the Glif, if purchased with Apple Pay; to grease the wheels, as it were. If you want to check out the redesigned ad with Apple Pay integration, simply tap the S/N logo on the home screen of Slow Fast Slow. If you are on a device that doesn’t support Apple Pay, the buy button is replaced with a button to studioneat.com.

Slow Fast Slow is an excellent app for slow-motion videos and I’m looking forward to playing with the new version (especially now that I have a new friend who will soon want to run and jump daily). I think it’s clever that Studio Neat is leveraging software to sell hardware and the experience of buying with Apple Pay in-app is intuitive and fast. I hope the experiment goes well.

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Boom 2 – The Root of All Good Audio [Sponsor]

Boom 2 is a pro-audio app for Mac that offers a system-wide volume booster, advanced equalizer control and presets, amazing audio effects and much more. This indispensible app was built from scratch and is designed especially for Yosemite. Boom 2 is tailored to calibrate itself to suit your Mac as no two are the same.

With personalized and customized sound to suit every occasion, it also gives you the power to fine-tune and control every single element of audio coming out of your Mac. Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, iTunes and every other service out there is about to sound a whole lot better. Boom 2 can be tried for free from the website and is now also available on the Mac App Store.

For more information, visit Boom’s website to check it out for yourself!

Our thanks to Boom 2 for sponsoring MacStories this week.

A Brief History of User Interface→

Every day, people all over the world are clicking, tapping, typing, and touching and dragging things on glass screens. Our ability to use all this fancy technology with ease didn’t happen overnight. So how did we end up here?

I enjoyed Dave Wiskus’ video on the history of user interfaces and how we went from keyboard input to the first PDAs, skeuomorphic interfaces, and multitouch. A great complement to Neven Mrgan’s video. You can watch it below.

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