What a year Plague Inc. and Ndemic Creations have had! (I know I said it last year but I really need to say it this year as well :P)
Thanks to the support of millions of players all over the world - Plague Inc. has well and truly managed to infect the world - almost 0.3% of the global population so far! In this report card - I will look at what happened in 2013, review how Plague Inc. has done and discuss my plans for 2014.
Interesting things in 2013:
- Mutation 5 released - adding the zombie producing Necroa Virus
- French, Italian, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese languages added to Plague Inc.
- I was invited to talk at the CDC
- Plague Inc. won loads of awards at Pocket Gamer
- I spoke at GDC 2013 in San Francisco about Plague Inc.
- I finally made the website look nice :)
- Cool article on the Escapist compares Plague Inc. to the real world
- Mutation 6 released - adding speed runs and CDC content
- Japanese, Korean, Russian languages added to Plague Inc.
- In a world first, Botoshel solved the very hard 'Not Another Zombie Game' achievement
- Moved into new office (Office Zero!)
- Went back to Atlanta to do a panel with some top CDC people at Dragon Con
- Plague Inc. Supported the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation
- Plague Inc. players procuded some amazing art and stories. Special mention goes to this comic which I now have printed in my office and this one
- Polygon wrote an in depth article about the making of Plague Inc.
- Bloomberg got some top scientists to play Plague Inc. and also did a TV interview with me about Plague Inc.
- Mutation 7 released - adding real world scenarios
- At Christmas - Santa infected the world with Joy
How did Plague Inc. do:
Incredibly, Plague Inc. managed to do even better than last year. This was very unexpected as usually games do best in their first year - thanks to everyone who made this happen.
Over the whole of the year, Plague Inc. was one of the highest charting games of 2013 worldwide:
- 5th most popular paid app in the USA and Japan
- 2nd most popular paid app in South Korea and Germany
- One of the top ten most popular paid games in the UK, France, Russia, Canada and Australia (and many other countries)
The Android version also did very well on Google Play but they don't release specific numbers!
I am immensely proud of these numbers. These rankings are not picked, they can't be influenced or manipulated. These rankings are hard, absolute facts, driven from millions and millions of people voting with their time and money. The fact that so many people have chosen to enjoy Plague Inc. is both humbling and incredibly rewarding.
These numbers also show that people want more Plague Inc. in the future - which neatly leads onto my future plans...
Future plans:
I am really, really excited for 2014 as have some incredibly cool stuff planned - if you like Plague Inc. and intelligent, sophisticated games - you should be excited too :P
Sneak preview of plans:
- Add Chinese + other languages to Plague Inc.
- Add new scenarios to Plague Inc. (secret)
- Add new plague types to Plague Inc. (also secret)
- Bring Plague Inc. to other platforms (very secret)
- Do New Stuff (top secret)
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