Archetype nets 160,000 players in first week, promises updates and features soon

We posted about Archetype the other day -- it's an impressively solid multiplayer first-person shooter for the iPhone that brings some hardcore gameplay to Apple's touchscreen platform. And apparently there are a lot of hardcore players out there -- in just one week of release, Archetype has picked up 160,000 players. There have been over 320,000 matches played so far, with over 2 million player kills between them -- that's over 20,000 an hour. Publisher Villian says that it's obviously thrilled with the response, and that "future updates, offerings and new game features" are being worked on.

This is interesting for a few reasons: first, most iPhone offerings tend towards the casual. Little pick-up-and-play games often seem to be the norm on the iPhone, as the vast majority of developers seem to be searching for one little interesting gameplay idea and running with it. But Archetype seems to hint that if the experience is done well enough, there's definitely a large audience of "hardcore" gamers on the iPhone.

And it's worth mentioning that Archetype doesn't have a lite version and sells for $2.99. Before this game, the most high profile FPS on the store was probably Ngmoco's Eliminate, which went with a free-to-play model in the hopes of garnering a larger audience. But Archetype's success seems to show that (again, if the experience is good enough), there's room at higher price points for a solid player base. We'll have to see where Villian goes with this in the future -- we've heard from other developers that quick and free updates can really make an app grow even bigger, so if they can pull that off with Archetype, they'll really have an iOS juggernaut.