Casual Games Harmony

It seems we’re not alone in our struggle to bring our iPhone app back to the AppStore after it was removed basing on a complaint from a competitor. The StoneLoops! precedence has apparently repeated as more apps have been removed in the same questionable way. You can read about the AppVault case here.

Anyway, the authors of AppVault have created a petition so that Apple hopefully reconsiders its policy towards copyright infringement claims, which currently clearly allows serious abuse. In our opinion Apple should definitely put more effort into checking the validity of each claim, because automatic removal of disputed apps is already causing harm to developers and customers alike. You can find the petition here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/open-competition-in-app-store

Thanks for your support and for helping us spread the news.

I’ve been recently receiving lots of questions about StoneLoops! and about our upcoming games so I decided that it’s high time to write about it. Even though we didn’t release any new games in 2009, the last year was quite good for us. We weren’t affected by the collapsing economy and we managed to release third expansion pack for Saqqarah, both StoneLoops! and Saqqarah were released on the iPhone and we also released a short flash webgame version of Saqqarah. But what you might not know is that in 2009 we have started working on 6 new games and we have an ambitious plan to launch all (or at least most) of them this year! Continue reading “More games coming up in 2010″

I know that lately I haven’t been blogging a lot, but recently something very notable  happened that I feel everybody should learn about. As you know our marble popping game StoneLoops! of Jurassica has been ported to the iPhone platform and proved to be a huge success. It  stayed in the global US app top 10 for almost two months and never dropped out of top 100. Until now that is, because today StoneLoops! has been removed from the App Store by Apple on the request of… MumboJumbo.

If you don’t know Mumbo Jumbo, this is the company that creates Luxor marble popping games. In fact Luxor is one of the  biggest marble popper franchises in the entire casual games market. When StoneLoops! was released on the PC and MAC it was over 3 years after the first Luxor game and the marble popping genre was almost dead. In result StoneLoops! never reached any serious top-tens and has stayed in the shadow of the giants - Luxor and Zuma. But on the iPhone it was the other way round.

Together with an external company Playcreek we managed to prepare a very solid port of StoneLoops! to the iPhone platform. It was a great success for us that we managed to launch the game sooner than MumboJumbo managed to complete their iPhone port of Luxor. In result the roles for StoneLoops! and Luxor have reversed in the AppStore. Due to an excellent port and good timing our game became the genre leader receiving hundreds of positive user reviews. In the meanwhile Luxor for the iPhone received very little attention and quickly dropped out of the various top100’s. I can imagine that MumboJumbo wasn’t entirely satisfied with this result, but hey – what can you do about it? It seems you can do quite a lot…

Continue reading “Where is StoneLoops? Or how to get rid of your competition in the Apple AppStore?”

I recently answered a question on a polish gamedev message board about how game sales vary by Country and I thought that it would be a good idea to post it here as well. As far as I know this kind of stats are very difficult to find.

The stats shown below are based on sales made over the last 5 years on our own website (www.codeminion.com). In this time we recorded online transactions in almost 100 countries (94 to be exact). I find it pretty impressive, as we even had sales in the Vatican. Anyway, click the continue reading button if you’d like to learn which 20 countries make up the most of our sales.

Continue reading “Sales stats by country”

Just a quick notice for you, that StoneLoops! is out for the IPhone and the game has so far exceeded our expectations. We are currently nr 4 app in the US and nr 3 in games. In many countries we are already nr 1. Here is the link to StoneLoops app store page, you can check how awesome the game is for yourself!

I’m happy to announce that our latest game Ancient Quest of Saqqarah is now available on the IPhone from the itunes appstore. The game has been ported to Iphone by Virtual Programming. What is interesting is that the conversion is a near direct 1-1 code port from the Mac version of the game. It means that whether you are playing Saqqarah on a Mac or Iphone you are running the same code. Of course the game had to be squeezed from 1024×768 to 480×320 resolution, but it still features almost all of the eye-candy effects and all gameplay features from the original.
 
The game has been broken into 7 parts, so each temple can be purchased separately. Below are the links to the 4 versions that are already available in the appstore. Other temples will quickly follow, along with free evaluation versions.

The Temple of Isis

The Temple of Thot

The Temple of Anubis

The Temple of Bast

After previewing the upcoming StoneLoops! for IPhone a week ago, I would like to make one more announcement about a game that we have coming up. Brunhilda and the Dark Crystal is a game that’s been in the works for almost a year now, but it’s not an in-house production. It’s being developed by a small but very talented external team.

The screenshots you can see above and below are the first ones shown publicly. Of course they still are a work in progress so the final materials might vary a bit. You can see that the game is different from our earlier games as it is not a match-3 and that it features a slightly different style of graphics.

Continue reading “Brunhilda and the Dark Crystal”

It’s not official yet, but I’m already sharing with you that we have licensed StoneLoops! for IPhone development and the project is already in a very advanced state.

As a proof I have uploaded a short video that shows how smooth the game is on the IPhone and how close it matches the PC/MAC original experience. Please note that it’s still a work in progress and the final version will be even better.

The company that is developing the port (which I will not disclose at this time, as I’m not sure if they would want it) has done an amazing job in our opinion. I’m not sure when the game will be finished, but it will be a matter of months or perhaps even weeks. Anyway, if you wish to be notified when the game is available please stay tuned or simply subscribe to our newsletter at our website.

If you haven’t been watching the downloadable casual game market lately you will be surprised to learn that 19.95 is no longer a standard price. For some time the market has seen loyalty programs (such as giving discounts to customers who sign up to buy more than one game) but now it seems that the 19.95 USD price point for casually buying  a single game is going away.

Continue reading “Prices go down”

I’m sure you’re disappointed about the recent lack of new posts on my blog (at least I hope you are) but I will try to get up to speed in the new year. Anyway, I would like to give you a short summary of what was happening here at Codeminion for the last months and what we are currently up to.

The latest news is definitely the recent release of the second level expansion pack for Saqqarah. You can grab Egyptian Encounters here. We haven’t decided yet if we’ll be doing a third SaqPack. It depends heavily on your interest in this release, but if it gets any close to the reception of Monkey Monarchs - which sold more copies than Saqqarah on our website - I’m sure we’ll make another one. Another cool thing is that if you decide to purchase Egyptian Encounters you will take part in our contest to get a picture of you featured in our next game.

Speaking of games, we recently had a small revolution. For about 6 months we’ve been working hard on a very ambitious large scale project, but we came to a conclusion that we don’t have the necessary resources to finish it in less than 2 years which was our goal. But don’t worry, we changed our plans and we are now working in-house on two smaller announced games which are to be released in early 2010.

Keep your eyes on our website as we will be announcing the projects soon.
And happy holidays to you!