Company Name: Call of Atlantis
Platforms: iPhone, Mac, PC, Nintendo DS, Facebook, vKontakte, Flash/Online Specialty genres: Match-3, Hidden Object, Adventure, Sim, Time Management and Strategy
Company size: 100+
Short description of company: Longtime casual games developer and publisher that recently expanded to the iPhone.
How did you and your firm get into the iPhone game development business?
Playrix is an experienced casual games developer and publisher. We’ve been creating games since 2004. Over the years we have grown into a 100+ team of professionals and built a solid reputation in the casual games space. In 2009 our company adopted a multi-platform strategy which resulted in forming in-house divisions for social networking games and for iPhone games, in addition to the downloadable games unit. We do want to deliver our games to the widest possible audience and we think that turning our own games into iPhone apps is a great way to achieve this goal.
In fact, two more Playrix games, 4 Elements and The Rise of Atlantis, were adapted for iPhone and iPod touch a while ago, but this was done by our partners. We were happy to see our hits on these popular and viable platforms, but understood that it’s the right time we try creating an iPhone app out of own game by ourselves to acquire this valuable developer experience. That’s why we decided that from now on we’ll adapt our titles for iPhone internally at Playrix.
In your opinion, how has the iPhone and Apple’s iTunes App Store changed the gaming industry?
This was the first real success story of a service for offering games on mobile platforms. It is exactly with iPhone entering the market that mobile gaming became so viable. A lot of strong and established companies rushed to this platform, and a lot of top-notch games appeared as a result. At the same time smaller independent developers have a chance to enter the market that does not require multi-gazillion budgets and receive good revenues. Prior to iPhone, mobile games weren’t even taken seriously as a market.
Describe the differences between developing games for the iPhone and the iPad.
Not applicable at the moment. As of today, our first internally developed application, Call of Atlantis, runs on iPhone and iPod touch only. iPad is on the way (coming this summer).
What factors go into how you ultimately price your games?
We analyze the pricing of the similar apps on the App Store. It is understandable that despite the exceptionally high quality standards of our games we cannot overprice them and ignore the general pricing
trends out there. We did offer Call of Atlantis at a discounted price when it was launched as our way to welcome as many players as possible to our game and get to experience what Playrix has to offer. We will
also apply sales for special occasions like holidays and anniversaries.
Describe what your dream game for the iPhone would look like.
Frankly speaking, iPhone is not that much of an innovative platform, in terms of technologies used, to be able to form a vision of an iPhone-specific dream game. What I’m trying to say here is that my iPhone dream game is really no different from a dream game on any other platform. It’s a game that keeps you so captivated that you simply can’t put it down. The only thing, the interface and the game controls have to be convenient for the use on touch screen. But even this is not crucial for a truly great iPhone game.
