If you want to hear about an App Store success story, look no further than ChAIR’s Infinty Blade series. Two games and just over a year after the release of the first Infinity Blade, the developer and publisher Epic Games announced that the franchise has pulled down $30 million.
The sequel, Infinity Blade II, was released in December 2011 to some pretty rave reviews. According to a press release from ChAIR, the game has already hit $5 million since its release on Dec. 1. Those are some huge sales for a single month – maybe not as high as, say, Angry Birds, but still extremely impressive.
The $30 million figure is also pretty impressive, but it covers a little more than just the two Infinity Blade titles in the iTunes App Store. There’s also the soundtrack for the games and a novella linking the stories of the first and second entry into the series, both available on iTunes, and a coin-op arcade game as well. But when you consider Infinity Blade II accounts for a sixth of that total after just a month on the market – with the first Infinity Blade having been out for a year and made a total of $23 million during that time – it seems that the latest App Store entry is pretty popular.
Probably the biggest part of the Infinity Blade success story is that the games both set a bar for what’s possible with Apple’s iOS devices. ChAIR pushed the graphics capabilities of the iPhone 4 with Infinity Blade, and did it again with Infinity Blade II and the iPhone 4S. By giving players superior, console-level graphics, the game sets itself apart from competitors in the App Store, and it’s a strategy that’s clearly paying off.
It helps that Infinity Blade II is pretty great. The title has won numerous awards and was named Game of the Year by many media outlets and has received a ton of attention. All those things come from its attention to detail, its great production values and its overall degree of fun. The Infinity Blade series has nailed what it means to be a high-performance mobile game, and created a great following and a big franchise because of it. Other developers should take note of what’s possible in the App Store.
