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Indie darling Monument Valley saw its total downloads boom by almost ten times last year.
As of January 15th 2015, Ustwo Games’ mobile puzzle title had been legally downloaded more than 2.4 million times across iOS, Android and Amazon – including more than 400,000 free downloads on the latter platform.
Jump forwards nearly a year and that number now sits at approximately 24 million downloads worldwide, Ustwo Games’ new head of studio Dan Gray told Develop.
“That’s great, but when you compare to the amount of people with mobile devices that we think would love the game, it’s not a high percentage,” he added.
“Part of my task is to work out how we scale what we have and reach more people without jeopardising what we’ve created and what we are going to create. It’s a really interesting challenge and it’ll be exciting to see whether we can fly the flag of really high quality premium games for the future.”
Not all of these downloads were paid; around a third of the additional downloads came via Monument Valley’s inclusion in Apple’s Free App of the Week campaign, with similar giveaways on Google and Amazon Underground also contributing. The game’s Chinese version, which is supported by local publisher iDreamSky, also helped boost the total.
Although the game’s paid expansion, Forgotten Shores, wasn’t included in the promotion, more than a third of iOS users now own the add-on – including one in ten one of those who got the base title for free.
“We did Apple’s Free App of the Week promotion just before Christmas,” Gray explained. “That resulted in about seven million extra downloads.
“As part of that, Forgotten Shores was still paid. There was a really good upsell rate for Forgotten Shores. Roughly 35 per cent of all iOS players have purchased the expansion. That upsell rate was never going to maintain when you go free, but it still stayed pretty high – about 10 per cent of free users actually felt compelled to spend money and buy the expansion.
“It’s good to get the tweets, emails and messages from people who say they love a game that’s been out for 18 months. It’s been good to get a second wind.”
