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‘Alto’s Adventure’ devs announce new game, and it's all about sheep herding
Indie game developer Land & Sea, the team behind ‘Alto’s Adventure’ and ‘Alto’s Odyssey’, just announced a new title ahead of this year's Day of the Dev's showcase during Summer Games Fest. Summerhill is described as a “story-driven puzzle adventure game” that casts you as both a sheepherder and your intrepid canine companion.
‘Desta: The Memories Between’ comes to Switch and PC later this month
Desta: The Memories Between’ is officially coming to the Nintendo Switch and PC on April 26th. This ends the game’s exclusivity to the Netflix platform. ‘Desta’ was created by ustwo, the developer behind ‘Monument Valley’.
Netflix plans to add roughly 40 more titles to its mobile game library this year
Netflix has revealed some its gaming plans for the rest of the year and beyond.
The Monument Valley games are coming to PC on July 12th
You can play the classic mobile puzzlers in widescreen for the first time.
'Monument Valley 2' and 'Alto's Adventure' are coming to Apple Arcade
'Shadow Blade' is also joining the lineup this month.
‘Monument Valley 2’ gets a new chapter four years after its debut
Ustwo Games added ‘The Lost Forest’ to promote forest conservation.
Apple Arcade adds over 30 games and a 'greatest hits' section
Apple Arcade has expanded to 180-plus games, including a mix of App Store classics like 'Monument Valley' and 'Fruit Ninja.'
'Monument Valley' studio reveals 'Alba: a Wildlife Adventure'
The independent studio, best known for the M. C. Escher-inspired Monument Valley puzzlers, is hard at work on a nature-focused title called Alba: a Wildlife Adventure. The virtual camera then passes over a sheet of paper titled 'Island clean up Initiative,' a bird-spotting book and DSLR, some photographs and, finally, a newspaper with the headline 'Girls start a wildlife league.'
'Go Go Bots' is a Facebook Gaming exclusive from Ustwo
Ustwo has released a fun new mobile game on Facebook.
Ustwo confirms there will be a ‘Monument Valley 3’
Fans of the meditative, mobile puzzle game Monument Valley will soon have more obstacles to tackle. British game developer Ustwo confirmed on Twitter today [via a job posting] that there will be a Monument Valley 3. It's still early days, so there are no details on a release date or what exactly the new entry to the series of M.C. Escher-style puzzlers will involve. The studio is currently hunting for a new game director, who will likely shape the course of the new game. "We'd also love a new Game Director to bring their own spin to this world, giving them freedom to explore while keeping just enough elements of Monument Valley 1 and 2 to stay true to our fans," an Ustwo spokesperson told Engadget over email.
Amazon wants to give paid apps away for free
Downloads from Amazon's Appstore almost assuredly aren't the raging success that the company's ventures like Prime are, but the retail juggernaut isn't giving up on it yet. In fact, the former looks like it's getting an injection of the latter's DNA with something called Unlocked. According to a leak obtained by TechCrunch, Bezos and Co. are experimenting with the idea of offering paid apps and in-app purchases free of charge. It apparently isn't limited to games either, as Monument Valley and Sonic Dash sit alongside productivity apps like OfficeSuite 8 + PDF Converter.
Monument Valley made $5.8 million, over 80 percent on iOS
Monument Valley developer Ustwo earned $5,858,625 from sales for the game as of this past Monday, as highlighted in a fancy infographic breaking down the puzzle game's earnings. Of that revenue, 81.7 percent was earned on iOS, compared to 13.9 percent on Android (where it was released about a month later) and 4.3 percent on Amazon. Ustwo says Monument Valley was installed on over 10 million unique devices, though its profits come from 2,440,076 official sales. The original game took $852,000 to develop while its eight-level Forgotten Shores update cost the developer $549,000. It first arrived on iOS in April 2014 and recouped its development costed in its first week; Ustwo has now clarified that its launch day on the App Store amounted to $145,530 in revenue. [Image: Ustwo]
Monument Valley dev sees app piracy a bit differently
Monument Valley was one of the biggest mobile titles of 2014, and that's a pretty big deal given that the game carried a premium price tag. On Monday, developer Ustwo revealed that just 5% of Monument Valley downloads on Android -- and 40% on iOS -- were paid for, suggesting a huge piracy rate across both platforms. In a subsequent Re/code interview, Monument Valley producer Dan Gray took a less critical stance on piracy than some might expect. "It's essentially free marketing," Gray said, noting that he believes the vast majority of those who obtained the game illegally wouldn't have purchased it anyway, and that by spreading word of the game it may have led to additional sales. It's impossible to know just how things would have panned out without piracy as an option, but the fact that Monument Valley ended up as a success in its the eyes of its creators shows that paid games are still a viable option. It's also important to note that not all of the unpaid downloaders were necessarily the result of piracy, as installs across multiple devices from a single App Store account are impossible to filter out. So, for example, if an iPhone user downloaded the game on both their phone and iPad, one of those downloads were show up as "unpaid."
Best of the Rest: Ludwig's picks of 2014
ATTENTION: The year 2014 has concluded its temporal self-destruct sequence. If you are among the escapees, please join us in salvaging and preserving the best games from the irradiated chrono-debris. Jazzpunk Jazzpunk is likely to be misunderstood, or impossible to understand, by design. You could say explanation comes as an insult to its eccentricity. The gist of it is that you're a spy completing missions in a surreal, robot-dominated world, the kind you might dream up after dozing off in the middle of a late-night Leslie Nielsen movie marathon. And while the convoluted wordplay wouldn't feel out of place in a Zucker spoof - in Japan, for example, you're asked if you prefer kimonos or kistereos – the barbs of reality are what really make Jazzpunk stick. Take its odd vision of dystopia, which is regularly mocked through one-off minigames (like a first-person shooter dubbed ... Wedding Quake). Here, you can put on a special visor that lets you see and blast nonsensical Wi-Fi passwords as they dance in the air around you. I mean, that's weird, but ... think about it. The concept is kind of weird to begin with, right here on Earth. Taken as a form of escapism, then, Jazzpunk is silly without taking you too far from the truth.
Monument Valley dev: 5% of Android players paid to play
Monument Valley developer Ustwo revealed that only five percent of the game's installs on Android are "paid for." It divulged "interesting data" about the game in recent tweets, clarifying that a "small number" of the other 95 percent of installs were legitimate. Additionally, the data does not account for the one promotional day in which Monument Valley was free on the Amazon Store. By comparison, Ustwo said that 40 percent of the installs for the game on iOS were paid for. Piracy isn't a new problem for the Android platform, as indicated by games such as Lucky Frame's Gentlemen!. The Edinburgh, Scotland-based independent developer announced in August 2013 that just 144 of the 50,000 downloads for Gentlemen! on Android were legitimate. Ustwo first launched Monument Valley on iOS in April 2014 before it arrived on Android one month later. The game reached one million copies sold in July after having recouped its development costs after one week on the App Store. It received eight new levels on iOS in November and earned a year-end award from Apple last month. [Image: Ustwo]
Monument Valley, Threes! receive Apple year-end awards
It's the year of the puzzler on mobile, as Apple awards the numerical master class of Threes! and visually luxe Monument Valley with game of the year nods. The gorgeous platformer Leo's Fortune was the runner-up iPhone game of the year. If these awards seem like deja vu, that's because these games also won Apple Design Awards back in July. Monument Valley received an expansion pack recently, Eschering more players to check out the perception puzzler.
App Store gamers are cheap, angry and whiny
Monument Valley developer Ustwo learned a harsh lesson about App Store customers this week when the group released a sizable update to its highly regarded iOS title. A level expansion titled Forgotten Shores added a further eight chapters to the popular puzzle game for $1.99, and if you had read any of the glowing user reviews for the game ahead of the expansion's launch you'd probably have guessed more paid levels were exactly what everyone wanted. "I've completed it 4 times already. Even though I already know how to get through each level, I still enjoy playing it so much. But please add more levels or release a new version. I am happy to pay for this!" "Hope the developers will continue to expand on this game. The puzzles and their beauty is amazing and I would certainly pay to keep this app alive." "Absolutely loved it. Took my time finishing, but really hoping for a sequel or more levels. Don't mind paying, really great game." After the release of the add-on -- which, I have to emphasize, cost about as much as a cup of coffee -- the reviews took on a drastically different tone. "You want me to buy a new levels in a $4 game? Well F U then." "I was really looking forward for more levels, only to be bumped out when I discovered that i had to pay for them." "Stingy developer. Game is already expensive and developer expect us to pay more." Reading the one-star reviews that have popped up for Monument Valley over the past 48 hours is like a comedy routine. I've never seen so many people who claim to love something immediately resort to bashing it when they realize getting more content out of it isn't free. This is like buying the first season of Game of Thrones on DVD and then writing an angry letter to HBO, demanding that the second season be given to you for free because you already paid once. It's asinine and it needs to stop. When Monument Valley first launched, many wondered if it could fight the good fight against free-to-play games and come away with something to show for it. Word of mouth and plenty of positive press resulted in the game becoming one of the most popular paid apps on the App Store, but it seems the free-to-play trend has finally found a way to bite back, with tons of customers assuming that any new content would be added for no cost. This is the expectation that games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush have created, where new content arrives regularly and is added for no cost. Where those games make up for it is in tiny microtransactions for items or in-game powerups, and even if the majority of users aren't falling for that trick, others are making up for them. Monument Valley doesn't have in-app purchases in that sense, which means new content -- and let's be honest here, a content update to a free-to-play game doesn't hold a candle to what Ustwo is offering -- costs real actual money. If you want to complain that you think the game is too short, go ahead. If you don't think the art style is anything special, that's totally fine. If you think the music stinks, that's absolutely a legitimate criticism. You can put all of these in your adorable little user review and there's not much anyone, including me, can say, because that's what a review is. But don't you dare expect every game developer to follow the content giveaway model that publishers like King and Zynga -- who, by the way, are hemorrhaging cash because their creations are eating them alive -- have popularized. If you're going to demand something for nothing, I personally hope you stop buying games entirely and go back to whatever it was you were doing before Candy Crush completely ruined your perception of what a game really is. If you feel like supporting real game development, Monument Valley's Forgotten Shores update is now available, and it's more than worth the price of a late fee at the public library.
Monument Valley gets eight new levels on iOS today
Pretty puzzler Monument Valley received a new set of levels today called Forgotten Shores. The pack is available as a $1.99 in-app purchase for iOS, opening up eight additional levels for players to solve. The new levels slot between the game's original final two acts, operating as a "director's cut" of sorts, executive producer Dan Gray told Wired. Forgotten Shores explores a few new gameplay ideas that developer Ustwo didn't fit into the original 10 levels, resulting in more steps to complete the latest puzzles. As designer David Fernández Huerta put it, the developer is "asking the player to think ahead a bit more" in Forgotten Shores. Gray also noted that Monument Valley recently celebrated 1.4 million downloads since its April launch, a steady climb since it hit one million downloads in July. As for Android players, the Forgotten Shores update will be available "very soon," Ustwo noted on Twitter. [Image: Ustwo Games]
Monument Valley is getting new levels and you should be excited
Monument Valley -- the gorgeous puzzle game that managed to catch fire at US$3.99 despite the free-to-play takeover happening on the App Store -- is getting an in-app purchase that will add a further eight chapters to the title. The add-on is titled Forgotten Shores and will go on sale Thursday, November 13, according to Wired. Developer Ustwo notes that Forgotten Shores isn't a sequel or direct continuation, but more like a bonus feature akin to something you'd find on a movie disc. Ustwo has also released a development video to accompany the announcement (which you can check out above), and also revealed that the game has sold a whopping 1.4 million copies thus far. Keep an eye out for the add-on pack, which will launch in a little less than a week and will be priced at $1.99.
A peak at one of Monument Valley's new levels
Yes, that is a pun in the headline. Thank you for noticing. Monument Valley is getting new "lost scenes" designed to double the average gameplay time of 90 minutes, and this is one of those levels. Well, it's part of one of those levels, as this one appears to be fairly grand. Developer ustwo shared the photo on Twitter (view it in full below). There's no word on a launch window for the new levels. Monument Valley recouped its cost of development in one week, reached 1 million sales in four months and won an Apple Design Award since launching in April.
