Space Ape’s hit music game Beatstar has passed $73m in total revenue and 38m installs in its first year.
And Space Ape boss Simon Hade has told us that his team “smells blood” and is ready to unleash more Beatstar-sized hits, with Boom Beach: Frontlines and two more potential launches on the horizon.
Alongside Beatstar’s 38m downloads and $73m in revenue, Space Ape also stated that $16m has been shared with music labels and publishers through the game, and that it is the top grossing music game globally. A high performing new song in Beatstar can get up to 1.1m plays in a day, it added.
Space Ape boss Simon Hade told us that after a long R&D phase, his team is ready for more launches and is targeting several Beatstar-sized hits.
“We’ve just come out of five years of not globally launching a game and doing a lot of prototyping, soft launching…and we’re now at the point where we smell blood,” Hade told us. “Right now all the stuff we’ve got in development feels orders of magnitude more complete and likely to succeed than anything we’ve done before.”
Space Ape is targeting two or three more Beatstar-sized games, and already has Boom Beach: Frontlines gaining traction in soft launch. So now’s the time to scale up further, says Hade.
“When these games come online, we want to chase them effectively rather than play catch-up,” he tells us. “Because the state of the market is that if you have a good game that comes out of the gate and you spend six months scaling up your organisation and building the capabilities to chase it, you miss that window. It’s not going to be crazy, but it’s also quite ambitious. Now’s the time to be more aggressive and chase successes, not to be too timid about it.”
Naturally Hade can’t stay too much about what’s coming after Boom Beach: Frontlines, but does confirm there are several titles shaping up nicely.
“We’ve got one more in the casual space that will become a soft launch soon, maybe this year, maybe early next,” he adds. “And we have another one coming up behind that, which is a little bit earlier. We’re very interested in the music category, very interested in casual and with Boom Beach we’re passionate about midcore so they’re basically the three categories we are focused on.”
