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 produced.
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 free.
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 continuously. 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 Joyride. Game Developer covered both the strategy and the turnaround.