DragonVale has been in the US box office gaming top 10 for a year now

Yesterday it was exactly one year since DragonVale has been sitting in the top ten American iPhone games at the box office. What is its secret, the British from PocketGamer decided to figure out.

The game entered the top ten exactly three days after its release – on Saturday, September 17, 2011. Since then, for 12 months, she has never flown out of it. 

“We knew that we had made a good project, we knew that it was very different from many other games, but we could not have imagined that DragonVale would last in the box office for twelve months,” says Julian Farrior, executive director of Backflip Studios.

And although such a success was a surprise for the company itself in many ways, Farrior has a couple of assumptions about how all this became possible. 

“One of the important components is constant updates,” Farrior shared. According to him, it is necessary that the team constantly create new content for the running game so that the stream does not dry up. 

Another important component of success is monetization. More precisely, its balancing. 

“We never corner players by forcing them to pay. And, it seems to me, users are grateful to us for this and spend more time with the game,” explains Farrior. 

“It may seem difficult to understand, but the fewer walls you put in front of the user, the greater the percentage of users pays,” he adds, clarifying that it is very important to balance the economy, and also to make sure that there is always something to pay for both a new player and one who is already in the game it’s not the first day. 

Of course, Backflip was also engaged in cross-promotion of the game. And not only in its own network: traffic was actively exchanged with the company’s partners. However, according to Farrior, the studio spent less than 1% earned by DragonVale on buying traffic. So the key to dominating the box office chart was precisely monetization. 

This can be judged by the absence of DragonVale in the top positions of the free apps chart, from which it even flew out of the top 100. Although this did not prevent the game from reaching the number of downloads of 13 million. 

Now the DAU of the project is more than 1.5 million, and the MAU is 5 million. 

As at the beginning of development, 15 people are still actively working on DragonVale. Part of the team is completing work on the Android and Amazon versions of the game, the other part is drawing and implementing new content in the iOS version.