Threes slides to Android, provides numbers about the numbers
The addictive, number-pushing puzzler Threes is now on Android, following its launch on iOS in February. It's currently 33.3 percent off on the Google Play Store, or $2, and it features all of the minimalistic design and party personalities of the original game. The port was handled by Hidden Variable Studios. Threes creators Greg Wohlwend and Asher Vollmer put together an infographic with some scintillating stats about the game in its first month on iOS, including the following information:
Of all players, 47 percent are from the US, while 14 percent hail from China – but in China, only 2 percent of players paid for the game, putting the supposed piracy rate at 93 percent. Each day, Threes fans play a cumulative 11 years, for 327 years in total so far. The current high score is 808,989, held by chu121su12, and the highest tile players have reached is 6,144 (six players have seen it). Less than half of players have seen the 384 tile, while more than 70 percent have reached the tile previous, 192.
Check out the full infographic after the break (click to enlarge). Wohlwend and Vollmer launched Threes on iOS first simply because of time and resources – and because of uncertainty about the game's success, Wohlwend told me.
"Releasing on multiple platforms would be really overwhelming and take us too much extra time to coordinate," he said. "It seems like we could have in hindsight, but at the time just before release on iOS we were really uncertain about Threes. It could go either way and so we do all we can, when we can. I think this is the case for just about every indie developer out there. When you release a game, you have no real data about if those many months of work will connect with people. So staying in that vacuum, with an unreleased game, and assuming that it's worth it to port it to every platform, can be a huge trap."
The team hasn't released information about how many players have gotten their paws on Threes, but given the new port and celebratory infographic, we're guessing Wohlwend and Vollmer's bets paid off.
[Image: Greg Wohlwend]
