Cult indie horror game The Baby in Yellow has racked up around 400m downloads – 320m on Android, 80m on iOS and just 100k on Steam. And almost all of those players found the game through content creators.
Cofounder of Dundee-based independent studio Team Terrible Greg Lee says his studio is now pulling in around £2m a year. He says that the comedy horror game went viral soon after release as smaller streamers started to pick it up.
“It wasn’t long until larger, more well-known streamers started to play the game,” Lee said. None of it was planned. The Baby in Yellow started life as a 48-hour entry for the GMTK game jam, inspired by a friend who had just had his first child.
Lee says its success was a huge surprise. “We’d made a lot of game jams by this point in time, and we use them as an excuse to have fun making something, or learn a new skill,” he told us. “We rarely go into them assuming we’re prototyping our next IP.”
The game originally launched on PC only, but soon, with other studios taking the concept and porting it to mobile, Team Terrible ported the official version to Android and iOS.
That turned out to be the right call. The studio’s roughly £2m a year revenue spikes by 50%-100% in years when major updates are released. Suprisingly, Android has consistently been Team Terrible’s biggest platform with 320m installs, though iOS also performs well, with 80m downloads. PC is now the smallest platform – about 100k downloads on Steam – but that desktop version still matters because it is “the main driver for content creators to engage with the IP”.
Lee said the audience shifts depending on the platform. Mobile players tend to be younger teenagers, while PC leans towards older teens, many of whom are streamers.
With no marketing budget, Team Terrible focused on making the game as accessible as possible – hence the free-to-start model. Players can unlock the full game for $4.99.
“We didn’t have any budget for advertising when we started, so we leaned heavily on making it accessible to as many people as possible to try and keep up the viral momentum we built,” Lee explained.
Team Terrible plans to keep that model for the game’s v1.0 release next year, which will finish the main story arc. Until then, it is continuing to roll out episodic updates, alongside occasional seasonal exclusives.
Being a horror game on mobile has been “a bit of a rocky ride”, says Lee, particularly when it comes to age ratings. “While it’s a horror game, we ensure there are certain lines we don’t cross – no blood, sexual imagery or realistic violence – however, it’s not always obvious to an app store or platform holder, and we have been rated much higher than we should have in the past,” Lee said.
Right now it’s all hands on deck to get v1.0 out, says Lee. he wouldn’t be drawn on what comes after, saying only that the team has a few ideas that are “all very secret for the moment”.
His advice for other small studios eyeing up mobile horror is simple: “Be original. Horror is full of tropes, and while it’s fine to lean into some, you need to make something unique that stands out. It’s a saturated market, and you need to bring something new to the table to get the attention of players.”
