Zodiapp: Or Why I Never Want to Develop a Freemium Game Again

Matt Gravelle and Nick Miller

This mini post-mortem will, in a nutshell, explain why we never want to work on a Freemium game again.

Freemium mobile games are often attributed making large sums of money. At the time of writing this, 199 of the 200 top grossing iOS apps are Freemium in some form! So when Graveck teamed up with their old buddies from Freeverse to build a Zodiac themed freemium game, it seemed like a winning combination. It wasn’t. After 3+ years of development, countless soft launches, and heavy iterations Zodiapp lived in the app store for only a month before it was deemed dead.

Graveck was officially Founded by Matt Gravelle and Jonathan Czeck in 2005. We entered the industry professionally with Big Bang Brain Games, the first boxed retail product developed by the Unity 3D engine (back when retail game sales was still a thing). Since then we’ve created a mixture of independent and work-for-hire games, seeing releases for big-name clients such as Disney and independent releases such as Skee-Ball and Strata. We also have some exciting things on the horizon that we may touch on in the presentation!

Member Project: Unite Conference Overview

Patrick Swinnea

A short summary of the Unite Conference, and the experience involved with the Unity certification test.