Nordeus, makers of the extremely popular web-based football manager Top Eleven, have released their first mobile application: the Android version of their main product. Top Eleven for Android offers the same features and gameplay to Nordeus’s more than 3 million players in a user interface made for mobile gaming. Like its “big brother”, the Android application is free to play.
Players can buy addons and both versions of Top Eleven use the same user profiles so players can easily move from the desktop to their mobile device, at least if they use an Android phone.
Nordeus’ CEO Branko Milutinovic told Techcrunch that although they’ve launched an Android app, an iOS version of Top Eleven is in the making since their structured settlement news have been set. Their plan was to first create the easier-to-produce of the two and then after testing it with their users launch the versions for Apple’s devices. Nordeus has had a lot of success with Top Eleven which beat EA’s web based version of FIFA in June in terms of active players: then 200,000 more than its competitor. Since then Top Eleven has grown to over 1,000,000 daily active users, an impressive number in their industry.
Top Eleven isn’t the only successful web based game to be ported to mobile devices. Zynga has developed iPad, Android and iPhone versions of a number of their games, such as FarmVille and Words with Friends. With a lot of casual gamers expecting to find the same or similar games on their smartphones like they play on the desktop, both Zynga’s and Nordeus’ efforts are logical.
This doesn’t mean the company is putting all their money and time “just” into mobile. Nordeus launched the new, 2.0 version of Top Eleven earlier in the month both on TopEleven.com and on Facebook. The companies has fast become a model for other regional startups because of both its model and its method. Nordeus has never developed software for clients, a method used by a lot of development companies in Eastern Europe to bootstrap their business. They haven’t taken any outside investments either and with a team of 30 people working on a now profitable project, there are no signs they are planning to do so soon. You can download Top Eleven on the Android Market for free.