Beatstar just passed 22m global installs and 1m daily active users, Space Ape has told mobilegamer.biz.
“It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever done by an order of magnitude,” says Space Ape founder and COO Simon Hade of Beatstar, a project led from start to finish by 15 year game development veteran Charmie Kim (pictured above).
Beatstar is now being discovered by 150k new players per day, says Space Ape, and is continuing to grow.
“A lot of games launch and then kind of reach their peak three to six months in,” says CEO Hade. “But what we see with Beatstar, through soft launch and after global launch, is that everything that the team has done has moved the numbers up.”
Tweaks to the game’s onboarding based on your song choices helped a great deal, says Hade, and then the addition of a season pass two months after launch effectively doubled the game’s revenues.
And the game almost didn’t make it out of development, says Charmie Kim. “Our original vision for the game was very different; more of an RPG story game with a rhythm mechanic,” she tells us. “After a few years pushing in the original direction it became clear we needed to reboot.”
“We were privileged to have the backing of Supercell and so could afford financially to fail, but resetting the team and persisting when most sane people around us doubted whether the project was worth pursuing was really hard.”
“It wasn’t until a few months after global launch that it became obvious we were onto something great,” she adds. “I’m most proud that we backed our instincts and persevered when it would have been incredibly easy to give up.”
Beatstar’s success marks a new era of more focused creativity for the studio, adds Hade.
“We joined up with Supercell in 2017 to sort of give us the runway to take more risks,” he tells us. “We went into this deep R&D phase. At some points, 90% of our studio was focused on new game R&D – we worked on dozens of games. Beatstar and the Boom Beach game that’s out in Canada are basically the output of those five years of R&D.”
“Now we’re a little bit more focused,” he adds. “We’ve still got two or three other games incubating, but now we’re really really focused on Beatstar and the Boom Beach game.”
