PocketFrogs
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Pocket Frogs getting a big update this week
NimbleBit has had two big freemium hits now with both Pocket Planes and (before that) Tiny Tower, but my favorite of the company's titles is still Pocket Frogs, where brothers and developers David and Ian Marsh first cut their teeth on the generous freemium gameplay they're now known for. And this week, they're returning to that title with a big update: Pocket Frogs is being updated for the iPhone 5 with version 2.0 on November 1. Not only will the updated app include support for the iPhone 5's taller screen, but it's getting new content as well. Over 40 new frog breeds are being added, bringing the total number of collectible amphibians up to 100. And NimbleBit is also making another big change: They're switching the game's backup and social system from ngmoco's Plus+ service into Apple's Game Center. That's a pretty significant change, but a solid one, since the official Game Center service has become much more prevalent lately. But it does have one side effect: Players will need to make sure they have at least one install (and run) of the current client before upgrading to the new client. Otherwise, the Game Center version won't be able to grab the Plus+ backup, so all of your frogs will be lost.
NimbleBit talks about the release of Pocket Planes, and what's next
Brothers Ian and David Marsh's NimbleBit is finally releasing its latest freemium title today (following on the company's success with Pocket Frogs and then the hugely popular Tiny Tower) called Pocket Planes. The app borrows Tiny Tower's little pixelated denizens and moves them over into a growing worldwide airline, tasking the player with building airports and planes, guiding planes around from one real life city to the next, and ferrying cargo and passengers all of the world to earn in-game coins and "bux." Just like Tiny Tower, the title is free to download and depends on in-app purchases of bux for monetization, and just like Tiny Tower, it's completely addictive and super charming. And just like Tiny Tower, it's probably going to be a huge hit. Ian Marsh met up with TUAW here at WWDC in San Francisco today, and while he says he is a little nervous to be flying home to San Diego tomorrow as the game launches worldwide, you can tell he's not panicking too much. He's been through this process a few times already with his previous titles (though given how big Tiny Tower got, this game certainly has the highest expectations NimbleBit's ever faced), not to mention that he and his wife had a baby girl last December. In fact, NimbleBit's biggest issue with Pocket Planes, says Marsh, was that it took so long to make. Most traditional games can take years to put together, but NimbleBit is used to a much shorter production schedule, so Marsh says that Pocket Planes' development, at nearly a year, was a little too "stretched out" for the brothers. They've had to spend a lot of the last year dealing with Tiny Tower's success rather than making the game. And they have hired on a few more part-time people, but Marsh tells me that even with the success of Tiny Tower (and the presumably pending success of Pocket Planes), he still doesn't want to make NimbleBit bigger. "We like making cool games," he told me. "If we have a team of other people making cool games, I'll be jealous that I'm not making them." What would NimbleBit do if Pocket Planes fails, if the brothers start to face issues with their current Tiny company structure? Marsh grins at the thought of Pocket Planes failing. "Make the next game," he says. NimbleBit has done so well with its current titles, and has kept things so compact, that even if Pocket Planes falls out of the sky, they'll just make another game they like. Right now they're in the concept states of their next title, which will be a word game. Marsh says they're returning to an old NimbleBit title called Textropolis, from before the company's freemium days. That game requires you to make words from the names of places, and Marsh says the new game will play in a similar way ("We really enjoyed Textropolis," he says), but it will be very much influenced by Tiny Tower's aesthetic, presumably in the same way that Pocket Planes is. That's further down the line (the brothers' main task this week will probably just consist of getting feedback on Pocket Planes), but Marsh says that NimbleBit does want to make development a little quicker and simpler. "We like making relatively simple games," he says. In the future, he hopes to bring NimbleBit back to the point where it's releasing a few games a year, much like the company did when it first started on iOS. Other than that, Marsh is happy to just keep on making games that he and his brother love. "We always can," he says. "That's the great thing about not answering to anyone else." Pocket Planes should land on the App Store this evening -- we'll have more on the game itself later on this week after release.
NimbleBit builds a tiny empire of quality freemium apps
NimbleBit's David Marsh kindly met with me at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week. While he's not interested in discussing the Zynga/Tiny Tower fiasco (a game he first showed me at GDC last year), the public's interest in that story is understandable. Zynga is a social company that uses analytics and testing to make its games easy to play and monetize. However, Marsh says he and his developer brother don't bother with a lot of analytics. "Part of the thing," he admits, "is that we don't try to figure it out a lot, because that's not the most fun part of making the game for us." NimbleBit consists of the two brothers, another programmer hired last August and David's wife, who manages support. The group is happiest while making good games that monetize themselves because users enjoy them so much. That's a contrast to many of the social and freemium titles out there. NimbleBit makes its games with love, and that's why it's funny when other companies try to copy their success without that key ingredient. When I asked Marsh if NimbleBit would consider acquisition by a larger game developer, he reiterated what he told me last year. "We're making enough money." Tiny Tower has consistently been on the App Store's top grossing list since its initial push, and then again after Apple picked it as the iPhone Game of the Year. "Getting Game of the Year for iPhone was really awesome for us," said Marsh. NimbleBit's next title, Pocket Planes, looks like it will follow the same pattern of success. Marsh gave me a quick demo of the latest build. The look and feel are very similar to Tiny Tower, but the goal is to build a network of planes that around the world, as opposed to an apartment building. Originally, says Marsh, the idea was to make a game about trains, and he even showed me a screenshot with train cars that had interiors using the Tiny Tower floors layout. But they found that running trains around tracks was too limiting and slow to be fun, so the trains became planes. Marsh says taking to the air has inspired a nice "jetsetting feel, about exploring rather than being stuck on rails." The build I saw looked great. You can buy planes with bucks earned either by playing the game or with in-app purchases, and then you can build airports at various cities, "unlocking" them with in-game gold (of course, any of that might change in the final release). Once you've got a plane and some airports to travel to, you can take missions from the in-game citizens, ferrying passengers or cargo from city to city. Each plane has a range, and each trip costs a certain amount, so the game currently consists of figuring out just how money you'll make versus spend on a certain mission. If you think that sounds complicated, you're right. Pocket Planes is the most complex freemium title that NimbleBit has put together yet. That doesn't mean it's inaccessible. While the worst you can do in Pocket Frogs or Tiny Tower is leave your frogs or bitizens unattended, in Pocket Planes you could lose money by playing badly. Could NimbleBit have the same success with a title that's more complex? Marsh says he and his brother are doing what they always do: making a game they want to play. "We're aware of the fact that it might have a smaller potential audience" due to the complexity, he says, "but that's one of the things we're interested to find out." Marsh also says that because it is still early in the development, there's lots of time left to spin the game more casual or complex. One idea he and Ian have played around with is "plane parts," which users could buy, trade, or collect, and use build planes with various stats. But that system isn't quite done, and it might not be included in the final game (or might be added in with a later update). NimbleBit hopes to release Pocket Plans in "summer, hopefully." Pocket Planes looks terrific, and it's great to see NimbleBit make great games that support a solid freemium model with excellent gameplay.
NimbleBit comments on popularity of Tiny Tower, working on new IP
Inside Mobile Apps has an interview with the winners of Apple's choice for best iPhone game of the year, David and Ian Marsh of NimbleBit. I was a huge fan of their freemium title Pocket Frogs, but it's their latest release, Tiny Tower, that has earned a lot of solid accolades (not to mention a bunch of in-app purchase money). I talked to the guys way back at GDC earlier this year before Tiny Tower came out, so it's good to get an update like this on where they're at now. Tiny Tower's been downloaded over 7 million times so far, and the brothers expect it to clear 8 million by the end of the year. And not only are people getting the game, but they're playing it, with nearly a million daily active users at peak, and around 600,000 right now. That's phenomenal for an app of this kind. Their income is also doing very well -- most companies were aiming for around 2% of the player base to be paying for in-app items, but NimbleBit says Tiny Tower is around 5% of the player base, with the average player putting about $10 in the pot. Overall, Tiny Tower has fewer "big spenders," but the bigger player population means there's more money coming in. Very interesting -- early on, the freemium market was mostly based on "whale" customers, or people who spent a lot of money to support a lot of cheaper players. But as quality goes up, we'll probably see more apps like Tiny Tower: high quality "hits" that have a large player base with a relatively high pay rate, but not as many "whales." Fascinating stuff. The Marshes also say they're working on a brand new title which will be a whole new IP, so we'll have to stay tuned and see what they're up to next.
GDC 2011: NimbleBit on Pocket Frogs and Tiny Tower
I've been a fan of twin brothers Ian and David Marsh and their iOS games company NimbleBit for quite a while now, so I was glad to finally meet them in person at GDC last week. The brothers Marsh sat down to chat with me about how the company came about, what they thought of the response to Pocket Frogs, and the game they're working on next. Before NimbleBit was formed, both brothers worked for a "traditional cell phone game development company," but when the iPhone arrived, they figured it was a chance to do something for themselves. Ian started on the company first, and David eventually joined him later on. The brothers have learned a lot over their various iOS releases, and one of the biggest lessons so far is that free is almost always the way to go. "A bigger audience is always better no matter what," I was told. Scoops was one of their first big releases, originally selling for $1 to $2, but when they switched it to free with an in-app purchase, it saw "ten times more downloads than it ever did paid."
Pocket Frogs hits 3 million downloads, 350k daily active users
NimbleBit developer Ian Marsh tweeted a link to a promotional infographic about popular app Pocket Frogs yesterday, and the title has apparently reached a whopping three million downloads in just ten weeks on the App Store. Daily active users have peaked at 350,000, which is a pretty sizable number for an app of this scale (you can also see on the graphic that it's been developed by a team of 2, and less than $500 has been spent on marketing the app). There's also some information in the graphic about the in-app purchases on the freemium app. According to NimbleBit, over 12 million potions and over 4 million in-game stamps have been sold to players. Prices on those actually vary depending on how many you buy at a time -- you can buy 10 for 99 cents, or 1000 for $29.99. But we've already heard that most of the purchases are of the 99 cent variety, so when you put the average closer to that, I calculate the app has made well over a million dollars. That's before Apple's cut, of course. How'd they do it? The graphic also points out that the average time inbetween game updates has been only around 11 days. Since release, NimbleBit has added some very significant features to the game, including a new mode to race frogs, new goals to hit while breeding them, and a social feature to share which frogs you're working on. Turns out the freemium model, combined with constant attention and improvement from a core team of devs, translates into player interest -- and profits.
NimbleBit: Over half a million playing Pocket Frogs, "3-4%" buying in-app purchases
I've been playing NimbleBit's freemium Pocket Frogs game since it was released last week, and apparently I'm not the only one -- Ian Marsh tells TUAW that the game has been downloaded by half a million people so far. The company is also seeing 200K daily active users, and while Marsh couldn't share exact stats on how many people have taken advantage of the game's in-app purchases, he estimates that 3-4% of the active users have bought stamps or potions in the game. Over on Twitter, he says that the 99 cent charges are the most common, making up half of the total purchases. But the $29.99 optional charges make up 8% of the purchases, and actually contribute to 49% of total revenue. In other words, just a few people are responsible for half of the game's total revenue -- the freemium model hard at work. Marsh says that NimbleBit is working on updating the game, too. They don't plan to increase the size of the in-game frog "catalog," since the whole point of the game is to have the player make decisions about which frogs to keep and breed, but they are working on something tentatively called the "Frogodex," which would passively track every frog ever collected by players in the game. They're also considering integrating Game Center in terms of leaderboards and achievements in the future -- they originally decided to go with Ngmoco's Plus+ system because it "provides a number of services crucial to social game developers which Game Center does not," including backing up game data and doing things like browsing your friends' frog habitats. And finally, Marsh says the company has been overwhelmed by all of the positive feedback, and the feature request list "is growing faster every day." The next big update they're planning, he tells TUAW, will be "a rare new pattern color mutation" that he thinks people will like. And he also tells us to look out for "exclusive surprises in-store for upcoming holidays." Sounds like NimbleBit has a nice freemium hit on their hands, and we'll look forward to updates in the future.
TUAW preview: NimbleBit's Pocket Frogs
Since I got my new iPhone 4 a few weeks back, I've been playing more games than ever on Apple's little handheld. I just recently got back into Ngmoco's We Rule. It's probably the pinnacle of the "freemium" genre on the iPhone so far. It's free to play, very social, and very much based on timed "check-ins," where you set crops to grow and then come back in a few hours to harvest them. It puts in little blips of gameplay that move you towards a larger progress goal. The only problem is that We Rule isn't all that fun; it's a bunch of clicking and grinding. So, lately I've been wondering when someone would add a fun freemium game to the App Store. It would have to be something that was social and progressive and all that that entails, but it would also need to have a game component that was actually fun to play. Enter NimbleBit! They're following up on their great froggy platformer DizzyPad with Pocket Frogs, a freemium title that actually adds some fun to the equation and shows a lot of potential as well. %Gallery-102063%
