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.

Most of the games we are working on are adventure / hidden object games, but we’ll also have something for puzzle enthusiasts and even a simulation type game with an original gameplay mechanic. But if you are hoping for a new match-3 game, I’m afraid that I will have to disappoint you. We don’t have any match-3 games currently in the works. One of the games we are working on is a small puzzle game for the iphone, but the other 5 will be big PC/Mac downloadable games.

Of all those 6 games the most complete one is Brunhilda and the dark Crystal. The game had a very rough development cycle (it was delayed many times) but it was worth all the efforts and we’re quite happy with how good it’s turning out now. We’re currently doing internal tests and we plan to start open beta tests in about a month. If you’d like to participate in open tests of the game please be sure to join our beta program now. We’ll soon be launching a dedicated website for the game, so stay tuned.

The next downloadable game that we’ll release will probably be Phantasmat. Just like Brunhilda, Phantasmat will be an adventure / hidden object game. I’m very eager to see how players will react to both games as they are totally different in terms of presentation, theme, story and even mechanics. If everything goes according to plan we should be launching Phantasmat open beta in early May.

Also in the first half of 2010 we’ll release the iPhone game I wrote about. This leaves the other 3 games for the second half of 2010. I’d rather not talk about specific dates as they still might change.

Finally I would like to address the StoneLoops! issue, as we get lots of questions regarding bringing the game back to the AppStore. Unfortunately I don’t have any exciting news to report here. When the game was removed from the AppStore we tried to defend our rights by reasoning with Apple and MumboJumbo but this got us nowhere. We’ve been consulting with lawyers for the past few months and currently it seems that the only way to end the dispute would be in the court of law. This would cost us a lot, it would certainly delay our other games and as usual the verdict might depend on which side has better lawyers. I know it doesn’t sound positive but we’re not giving up just yet – we’ll still be looking for other options and although going to American court against a larger American company seems a very risky endeavor for a small Polish company like us, we haven’t ruled anything out just yet.

Anyway I would like to thank everyone who supports us, and I will let you know when anything new turns out.

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…

About 3 weeks ago we have learned that MumboJumbo supplied Apple with a formal complaint and a request to remove StoneLoops! from the AppStore. The reason? Infringing Luxor copyright, confusing customers, stealing Luxor’s look & feel and even stealing their source code! This might sound absurd to anyone who knows both games but apparently Apple decided otherwise as we’ve been requested to prepare a formal response, which we did. We described how ungrounded each claim is and supplied various materials to back our claims.

Among all the MumboJumbo claims there was a single one which had some merit. The users were able to input “Luxor” in the iTunes search field and StoneLoops! was one of the returned results. Of course Luxor was still the first result. This was because the game description featured several excerpts from game reviews. The one which caused the “problem” was a citation from GameZebo – “more than worthy match for even more established industry goliaths like Zuma and Luxor…”. Our response was that we are willing to remove this part from the game description if Apple decides that this common practice is not appropriate in this situation.

Several weeks have passed since our response and we started thinking that Apple has ruled in favor of our explanations. Unfortunately to our great surprise today we have learned that StoneLoops! had been removed from the AppStore. It was also quite a shock to learn that the final decision was actually made by MumboJumbo as apparently Apple asked them if our response was satisfactory. Of course MumboJumbo replied that they still want StoneLoops! removed. After all if you were to decide whether your direct competition will be allowed to sell products or not, would you allow them? Talk about unfair competition – Luxor is selling, StoneLoops! is not. I wonder what happens when Zuma launches in the AppStore. Will PopCap request to remove Luxor with similar claims? Such case would be identical.

In fact if Apple stands by its decision this will create a dangerous precedence. If you are a developer and have an application in the AppStore you should quickly request Apple to remove the apps of your competition, before someone else requests to remove you! I don’t believe this can get any more absurd, but this is exactly where this reasoning is getting us.

Another funny thing is that MumboJumbo was one of the publishers considered when releasing StoneLoops! They’ve been shown the game before it was launched and never expressed any serious interest in it or any doubts about copyright. This of course changed when our game performed considerably better on the iPhone.

Unfortunately this is all of the story so far, but I hope it’s not the end. We’ll be trying to bring StoneLoops! back into the AppStore and I’ll be writing about new developments as they unfold. In the meantime if you want to play StoneLoops! you can do it on a MAC or a PC. In fact you can get StoneLoops! on almost every casual game portal – the game has been selling right next to Luxor and other marble poppers for years without any problems whatsoever…

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.

1. United States  -  37,44%
2. United Kingdom  -  11,30%
3. Canada   -  8,54%
4. Australia  -  6,20%
5. Germany   -  6,16%
6. France   -  5,14%
7. Netherlands  -  2,87%
8. Italy   -  2,66%
9. Poland   -  2,17%
10. Belgium   -  1,55%
11. Sweden   -  1,49%
12. Denmark   -  1,34%
13. New Zealand  -  1,19%
14. Spain   -  0,98%
15. Switzerland  -  0,91%
16. Brazil   -  0,81%
17. Norway   -  0,79%
18. Austria   -  0,64%
19. Portugal  -  0,62%
20. South Africa  -  0,60%

As you can see the top 20 countries make up almost 94% of all our sales. The top 10 makes up almost 85%. This leaves about 6% for the other 74 countries. This is a very common effect and it applies (to a certain degree) to other charts as well. For example the games that are on the top-10 of a portal probably make a very signifficant part of the income of all the games.

Please do remember that these stats are based only on the sales made on our own website and there is no way to know how similar the results are to the global average for all casual games distributed online. For example Poland is featured on the 9th place, but it is quite safe to assume that its position is boosted by the fact that we are a Polish company and that we offer games in Polish localized versions, which is quite uncommon on the online casual game market.

The Temple of Isis

The Temple of Thot

The Temple of Anubis

The Temple of Bast

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.

Brunhilda will be a story driven adventure game featuring a lot of hidden object quest as well as mini games to spice things up. We hope to have a beta version of the game in about 3 to 4 months, but no strict dates have already been set as there is still a lot of work to do.

Brunhilda will also be a second game to use our own CUG Framework engine (Ancient Quest of Saqqarah was the first one). Also you might be interested to learn that we currently have 2 other games in development that are using CUG technology. Brunhilda is the most advanced, but I have a hunch that other games will also be announced soon…

If you enjoy casual adventure games and you’d like to take part in the upcoming beta test of the game, be sure to join our beta program.

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.

Several days ago Reflexive (one of the few portals that resisted trends to introduce subscriptions and loyalty programs, currently owned by Amazon) decided to introduce new price points 9.99 and 6.99. The good news is that Reflexive is the ecommerce provider for our own game portal so you can now buy games at these low rates from GameClubCafe.The good news is for the customers of course. After all we’re in the midst of an economic crisis so any prices that go down are welcome in the eyes of the customers.

The funny thing is that the casual game price cuts are not a result of the crisis, but of the rising competition on the market. The number of games produced is still going up and the many portals and publishers are looking for more aggressive strategies to attract and keep customers. The sad part is that it’s all happening at the expense of developers. After all there are so many of them, that even if some of them go bankrupt the portals will still have plenty of games to choose from.

The situation is sad because the developers are after all the ones who create all the games we play. If the conditions keep getting worse for the developers it will sooner than later reflect on the quality of games. Today everyone tries to play safe and it means less original, innovative content that could possibly push the whole market ahead. Additionally the games could be shorter – who has the time and money to create long games with 10+ hours of gameplay and sell them for less than 10 USD?

Another worrisome observation is that although the prices went down, we don’t have any new standards. You can find many different  price points on the market today (ranging from 5.99  USD to 30 EUR) with all kinds of different strings attached. This is a real mess, and what’s worse it probably means that the price war is not over yet…

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!