Ramine Darabiha · AI-native product builder

Rebooting a Four-Year-Old Game to the Top of the App Store

GDC · GDC, Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit · 2015 · 42 min

How a four-year-old game most studios would sunset went back into the U.S. top 20, and the live-ops playbook it produced.

A talk about reviving a game everyone had written off, and the repeatable live-operations playbook it produced¹².

Age of Zombies looked finished. Instead of sunsetting it, we treated it as a product still worth investing in. Four years after launch, it climbed back into the top 20 of the U.S. App Store, paid and free³¹.

The method was repeatable: a faster release cadence, themed updates timed to editorial and platform moments, over-the-air content delivery, and production changes that let a small team ship continuously⁴. Every update became a reason for the App Store to feature the game again, and a reason for lapsed players to come back.

That same playbook, games as a service plus disruptive updates, then carried across Halfbrick's portfolio, including Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride⁵⁶. Game Developer covered both the strategy and the turnaround²³.

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