Layton Brothers: Mystery Room – 1 million downloads

While some are talking about the death of freeware and quests, and others about the bright future of free-2-play and endless gameplay as a necessary condition for success, Japanese developers from Matrix Software are going their own way. 

The first information about Layton Brothers: Mystery Room appeared in 2009. It was originally planned that Layton Brothers: Mystery Room, which at that time was simply called Mystery Room and was supposed to be one of the games in the casual Atamania series, would be released on the Nintendo DS. But two years later it turned out that Level-5, the game’s publishers, had other plans. 

Firstly, they decided to release the game under a more famous brand, and at the same time change the main characters. Alfendi Layton and Lucy Crale from Scotland Yard took the place of the brilliant private detectives Pozzo and Sly.

A small remark: Layton is a very strong IP on Nintendo portable consoles. Under the title Professor Layton, six extremely charismatic projects have already been released, which are something in between a quest and a set of minigames.

So, the main character of the Mystery Room is the son of Professor Layton. In fact, the new Level-5 project is an offshoot of the main brand. 

The second major decision, which became known in 2010, was the refusal to develop a game for the Nintendo console. The project was supposed to be an iOS exclusive. 

In general, that’s what happened. And last September, the Japanese version of the game was released. It was distributed for the equivalent of $8.99 and for the first month it steadily hung in the top 100 paid applications. Then, as is often the case with paid single games, her performance went down. 

But after lowering the price at the end of this May to $2.99, Layton Brothers: Mystery Room returned to the top. Moreover, the game managed to stay in first place in the top of paid applications for five days (as it turned out, according to App Annie, this is equivalent to 70 – 170th place in the cash Japanese App Store). Then the indicators began to decline again.  

A little later, on June 27, a shareware version of the game was released for the Western market. The first two episodes in it are free, and the rest must be bought. The game failed to take top places in the leading markets (neither in general nor in the gaming top), but it was noted in the adventure category, entering the top 5 in 52 countries by downloads.

It would seem that not the most favorable fate for a project that has been in development for at least four years. However, according to Level-5, the total number of downloads of the project to date is already more than 1 million. 

This suggests that along with the growth of the mobile market, at least, good downloads are real not only for market leaders.

P.S. Behind the numbers, we completely forgot to mention the game itself. Layton Brothers is closest to Ace Attorney in gameplay. Only there are no showdowns in court. The user in the game examines the crime scene, communicates with witnesses and potential suspects, finds out who the killer is based on the collected evidence. 

Sources: gamespot.com, andriasang.com