Monument Valley in Numbers
blog.monumentvalleygame.com
Monument Valley in Numbers
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#2I love MV and I'm glad they made ~4x their costs, but geez, if you have to be a pantheon-level game to make a few million dollars, it's a bad sign for normal paid games. Mobile games are either freemium farming games or have an absurdly high bar to be financially successful.
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#3I love MV and I'm glad they made ~4x their costs, but geez, if you have to be a pantheon-level game to make a few million dollars, it's a bad sign for normal paid games. Mobile games are either freemium farming games or have an absurdly high bar to be financially successful.
Pretty much. A 4x return is great and all, but MV was likely the best reviewed and most Apple-hyped paid iOS game of the year. To only make 4x return off of it is pretty unfortunate for the platform.
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#4I love MV and I'm glad they made ~4x their costs, but geez, if you have to be a pantheon-level game to make a few million dollars, it's a bad sign for normal paid games. Mobile games are either freemium farming games or have an absurdly high bar to be financially successful.
Pretty much. A 4x return is great and all, but MV was likely the best reviewed and most Apple-hyped paid iOS game of the year. To only make 4x return off of it is pretty unfortunate for the platform.
They also got a ton of hate for being a paid game, with their expansion pack it was a total of $6 if I recall. This got them swarmed with a ton of angry people giving them one star reviews. That's very telling of what the mobile game market is like. Also I feel like part of why iOS turned out to be such a large chunk of the revenue is because of the large time gap between iOS and Android release.
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#5I love MV and I'm glad they made ~4x their costs, but geez, if you have to be a pantheon-level game to make a few million dollars, it's a bad sign for normal paid games. Mobile games are either freemium farming games or have an absurdly high bar to be financially successful.
Pretty much. A 4x return is great and all, but MV was likely the best reviewed and most Apple-hyped paid iOS game of the year. To only make 4x return off of it is pretty unfortunate for the platform.
They also managed to piss off many of their original customers by charging them for the Forgotten Shores levels. When the original was released, the main menu indicated that there were going to be more levels added in the future. Many people were under the assumption that the $4-5 they'd already spent on the original ten levels would've included the the cost of the additional levels that was advertised in the main menu. It didn't and then ustwogames got upset when they started getting one star reviews for their bait and switch.
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#6People don't pay up front for games anymore. They need to make a MV 2 that is free with a few levels + IAP to unlock the rest. That way more people can get hooked to the game mechanic and decide to upgrade.
Also, it still looks like android users expect free-ish games.
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. A 4x return is great and all, but MV was likely the best reviewed and most Apple-hyped paid iOS game of the year. To only make 4x return off of it is pretty unfortunate for the platform.
They also managed to piss off many of their original customers by charging them for the Forgotten Shores levels. When the original was released, the main menu indicated that there were going to be more levels added in the future. Many people were under the assumption that the $4-5 they'd already spent on the original ten levels would've included the the cost of the additional levels that was advertised in the main me…
In terms of revenue, they would still be making much less if they didn't charge for the expansion. You can see most of the revenue came from the initial release of the original and expansion. If the expansion were given for free it may be more like a 3x gain on their investment. If they added IAP for the new levels, they would probably still get the 1 star reviews.
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#8Anyone know how they achieved such huge sales the first day/week they released? From other app/game stories I've heard it often takes a while for people to notice new apps and gain traction.
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#9I love MV and I'm glad they made ~4x their costs, but geez, if you have to be a pantheon-level game to make a few million dollars, it's a bad sign for normal paid games. Mobile games are either freemium farming games or have an absurdly high bar to be financially successful.
Pretty much. A 4x return is great and all, but MV was likely the best reviewed and most Apple-hyped paid iOS game of the year. To only make 4x return off of it is pretty unfortunate for the platform.
The development cost didn't separate the ios and android releases, but I agree, it probably would only have been a marginal increase. Doubly unfortunate for android.
Re: Monument Valley in Numbers
#10Anyone know how they achieved such huge sales the first day/week they released? From other app/game stories I've heard it often takes a while for people to notice new apps and gain traction.
Apple was promoting that game pretty hard before release and they had a prominent place in the App Store. I think they got it because it was iOS only for a spell and apple played that up.