CarylShaw
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Interview: Ngmoco's We Rule after a year on the App Store
Ngmoco's We Rule has arguably changed the App Store since its release. Before We Rule, the App Store was generally based on a rather traditional gaming model -- developers released games for a price, and customers paid or didn't pay based on that price. But with We Rule, Ngmoco (as outlined by CEO Neil Young at last year's GDC) showed that freemium could really work on the App Store, and the ensuing shift led us away from more traditional games and further into the idea of games as a service -- games that took advantage of a large free audience to make money with microtransactions. Now, a year after release, Ngmoco says that We Rule is doing better than ever. It's reached 13 million downloads and has seen 13 billion minutes played over the past year. On a daily basis, 15 million bottles of mojo (the game's main microtransaction currency) are being spent, and while plenty of those are earned for free in the game, there's no question that We Rule has seen plenty of success. TUAW spoke with Caryl Shaw, an executive producer at the company, and she told us a little bit about who's spending all of those minutes in game, Ngmoco's responsibility around microtransactions, and the future of We Rule and Ngmoco's other properties.
