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Infographic: The Brainsss behind an App Store 'success' that was probably 'a mistake'
The App Store ecosystem works wonderfully for Apple and the people who purchase and play games on their iPads, iPhones and iPods; the same can't be said for all app developers, Lonely Few's Rod Green told us today. Green and his partner, Yeong-Hao Han, are out thousands of dollars and at least two years of development time on their iOS debut, Brainsss.It did well, by Apple's standards. By Yeong-Hao's standards, however, the two years he and Green put into making Brainsss an intricate, highly stylized, top-down zombie title was a poor business move."From a business point of view, that was probably a mistake, but we really wanted our first iOS game to turn out exactly how we wanted it to be," Yeong-Hao told CBS.Green and Yeong-Hao are now focused on creating titles with quick turnaround and less complexity, a method the App Store seems to support, if the flood of single-swipe hits is anything to measure by.Piracy also played a part in the dissemination of Brainsss, but Green said he doesn't see that as a negative: "In short we feel that most of the time these pirates aren't actually lost revenue at all, but more a chance to get the awareness of the game out there. It's the nature of the digital age and something we felt we needed to just accept rather than waste time trying to prevent."Below: find an infographic breaking down the sales of Brainsss over its first month, along with some more information about user behavior and piracy trends around the world.
Brainsss: What Apple considers an App Store 'success' may be a developer's nightmare
In 2010, Rod Green and Yeong-Hao Han left lucrative, steady jobs in the mainstream gaming industry to enter the erratic world of indie development with their own studio, Lonely Few. They assumed making a complex yet accessible, high-quality zombie game for iPad would do well on Apple's App Store, and they were right.Brainsss, Lonely Few's breakout title, became a featured app, generated a fair amount of media buzz and received stellar user reviews when it launched last month, and it is what Apple would consider a "success."Unfortunately, Green and Yeong-Hao would consider it something else entirely.The pair put $20,000 into the development of Brainsss, and at the end of the first month, after its launch-sales spike and the end of its "featured" spot, the game has generated $31,000. This has to cover the initial development costs -- which included paying for the engine license and Apple SDK -- and their salaries for the year.
Play as a rampaging zombie in Lonely Few's debut iOS title, Brainsss
Rod Green is a zealous, proud, card-carrying undeadist, and he's prepared to fight -- to the death -- for the equal rights of zombies across this nation's shopping malls, busy streets and suburban neighborhoods.Green asserts that zombies are simply "misunderstood" and humans are "big bullies," said with much the same bravado as a big-cat trainer with his back to an open tiger cage. Unlike certain tiger trainers, however, Green may have a point, and he's set out to prove it with Brainsss, the first title from his two-person independent development studio, Lonely Few. Green, previously of BioWare, and his partner, Yeong-Hao Han of former Pandemic Studios fame, have been working on Brainsss for two years and plan for it to launch on iOS devices in late March, Green tells Joystiq in an exclusive interview. Brainsss isn't a typical zombie game. Keeping with Green's social beliefs, in Brainsss you play as the undead, trying to "persuade" humans to become zombies as well. Zombies do maul humans, "in the cutest way possible, of course," Green says, and they then become part of the players' undead army. The more humans your zombie converts, the more professional people you can persuade to join the undead cause, including police officers, hazmat workers, soldiers, fire fighters and the like. Green calls Brainsss an RTS for the touch platform, and compares it to Pikmin's adaptation for the Wii and the original Syndicate's "persuadatron" mechanic.%Gallery-148933%
