A New Mobile Social Games King In The U.S.? Former Facebookers Take Storm8 To 210 Million Downloads
Co-founded in 2009 by Chak Ming Li, Perry Tam, and William Siu, all former Facebook engineers, Storm8 is most well known for being the creator of addicting role playing games on the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices — as well as for being the parent company of top mobile social game developer, TeamLava. According to Tam, who is also Storm8’s CEO, each game released by the Storm8-TeamLava group has reached the Top 10 on the App store free app category. Not too shabby.
The team’s suite of games, which includes titles like iMobsters, World War, Vampires Live, Pets Live, Bakery Story, Restaurant Story, and Fashion Story, is currently averaging over 4 million daily active users, Tam tells me.
What’s more, earlier this month during a promotional event, Storm8 reached a unique achievement: It had its first “million dollar day”, which of course is another way of saying that the company raked in $1 million in a single day thanks to in-app purchases made utilizing its freemium model.
Frictionless payment methods and easy-to-find and utilize virtual rewards, Tam said, are the key to success in taking advantage of the mobile revolution catching on across the globe. Not only that, but the CEO has high hopes for the Android market:
We believe Android’s time in social gaming has arrived and feel our new titles will flourish thanks to innovations we’ve made in gameplay and the overall improvement of Android infrastructure.
While 210 million+ downloads across 58 million devices and a user base that has grown 300 percent this year are certainly impressive stats (as are those in the graphic above), I’m still hesitant to give Storm8 the “largest mobile social games maker” crown, but this does seem evidence enough to prove that there is some serious competition for our hearts and minds in social games on our mobile devices. Storm8 will no doubt continue to play a big role in mobile social games in the foreseeable future. So check ’em out.