When Philipp Stollenmayer released Bacon – The Game nearly eight years ago, he had already landed a few lowkey hits based on a similar formula.
Two predecessors, Pancake – The Game and Burger – The Game each saw players flip physicsy foodstuffs onto each other to get the highest pancake or burger stack. But Bacon was different and more naturally viral in nature – you flip slices of fatty pork onto (or into) an array of fun objects, from the statue of liberty to the back pocket of a pair of mom jeans.
Bacon – The Game took off quickly, went viral in China on TikTok (at least twice), and remains Stollenmayer’s most-downloaded game. His other titles are excellent too, and include Apple Design Award winner Song Of Bloom, Verticow, Zip Zap, see/saw, Sticky Terms, PBJ The Musical and Supertype.
But Stollenmayer, as if to cement his indie auteur credentials, seems to pay little attention to things like metrics. When asked about his games’ downloads and revenue, he responded simply: “Sorry, no comment on figures, I don’t know them anyway”.
Next week, he releases Bacon in Zane, a Bacon – The Game sequel of sorts that sees players control the titular delicacy on a journey through the human body, because Stollenmayer’s work now has “an educational remit”, he says.
It’ll be free, and mostly monetised with ads, though players can remove them with a one-time $2.99 IAP. It’s a business model that works best for the type of games Stollenmayer makes. “I see many indie devs that are uncompromising when it comes to their games. Most would say that ads or in-app purchases would ruin their experience,” he tells us.
“That is a noble thing, but sometimes, especially on mobile, not very sustainable. When I make a game, I plan the monetisation model at the very beginning and build the game around it. That can also mean that it will be a paid game after all, but then it has to be clear that it will earn just a fraction of a game with ads. I am trying to keep a good balance, and even though I have a pretty mild ad frequency and no returning in-app purchases, I earn a lot more with ads than with paid games.”
True to form, where discovery in concerned, Stollenmayer is not really tracking where his players are coming from, but Bacon – The Game continues to get featured pretty regularly on the App Store. “It still has a great effect on the game, and it still has more downloads on iOS than Android,” he explains.
And like the TikTok-led spikes of the past, virality seems to be built into his physicsy, slapstick-adjacent games. One recent Bacon – The Game spike came from Threads in Taiwan some time ago, when the “whole of Taiwan discovered that you get a letter with a tiny medal when you finish the game,” says Stollenmayer. Millions of players in Taiwan then set about doing exactly that.
“I love thinking of creative marketing like that, and I am trying to do the same with my next game,” he says, explaining that there are five phone numbers hidden in Bacon in Zane and whoever calls them first wins the phone that rings.
It’s these kinds of ideas that are keeping Stollenmayer on mobile, it seems. Though indie games have been declared dead several times over on mobile by this point, this auteur is sticking with it, for now at least.
“I still believe that a mobile device has a lot to offer what consoles don’t have, which is mostly caused by the way how we use phones and perceive them as closer and more personal,” he adds.
“But the phone hasn’t changed much since the first iPhone, and the mystery of experimenting with the novelty has mostly been replaced by games that try to catch you with longterm commitment. As long as the gap between F2P games and premium games is so huge, there need to be other arguments.”
