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Appolicious: The concept for Landlord Real Estate Tycoon is very interesting with location-based real estate elements. Can you tell us a little bit about the game? What spurred the development of a game with such distinctive aspects?
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Paul Chen: Landlord Real Estate is a location based property trading game allowing you to purchase real estate from a selection of 50 million real life objects worldwide. You get points from social media check-ins of each venue’s visitors. Our founder thought up of this from a night of playing Monopoly. His background is real estate, so this marriage seemed only natural.
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Appolicious: 2 million downloads in 6 months at zero acquisition cost is a level of achievement that all game developers wish to get but few rarely do. What components of your game do you think have contributed most to its massive growth?
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Paul Chen: We feel that because we are using real world objects with realistic markets inside the game, very little explaining was necessary. And the opportunity to “own” some real world premium property such as the Eiffel Tower was also quite attention grabbing. We feel that the thing that took us global was the fact that we decided to localize the game in more than 18 languages in the beginning and then over 40 later on. Not only that, we used images of local properties in our marketing materials according to different app markets. We feel because people like to use things with elements of familiarity. This could be something that set us apart from other games. Players also liked the thought of owning different properties in their own area.
https://youtu.be/dwRJJ6A4Kn0
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Appolicious: Location based-games such as Pokémon Go have been recently growing in popularity. Do you think that there are any limitations with this new model of gaming or has it been a means for Landlord Real Estate Tycoon to differentiate itself from the thousands of games available on the market?
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Paul Chen: Location based gaming is nothing new in the gaming ecosystem. But it has always been quite a niche area. Landlord was one of the first that took the genre mainstream. Pokémon Go just took the scale and the possibility into the stratosphere. Most of the other location based games you had to play with a group of people for it to be fun. With Landlord, you can play alone and be OK with it. Pokémon is also the same. With the addition of augmented reality, it adds a few more layers of possibilities to the genre. However, that is not what we are going for. Our aim is to use real elements of big data and create games from it.
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Appolicious: Can you tell us more about the team and its dynamics? Who are the main contributors to the game and what are their roles?
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Paul Chen: Currently, we have 15 developers building and improving the apps, 4 customer service reps, some a couple graphic designers, and a couple other support personnel. Our main people are the founders, Zbigniew Woznowski (CEO), Peter Sas (commercial director), Sebastian Lagemann (CTO), Michal Lagodzic (COO), and Rafal Nowocien (Project Coordinator). They are the ones building the company navigation map and keeping the ship sailing in the right direction. However, every member of the team is important to the company in their own way.
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Appolicious: As a game that has achieved worldwide fame, what can players expect in the future? Are you able to share any details about upcoming plans?
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Paul Chen: We will be releasing some new updates on iOS and Android to fix any bugs that may have arisen, improving the user experience, and adding some new graphics to the game. As you can see on our website, we are going to release Weather Challenge, a betting game, and Speculate, a social media stock market game, in the upcoming year. So stay tuned!
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Appolicious: Thank you, Paul for being a great guest and for thoroughly answering our questions. Completely free on both the App Store and the Google Play Store, be sure to check out Landlord Real Estate Tycoon for a real-world twist of the classical Monopoly.
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