I love MonsterUp Adventures. It’s my favourite game:) When I started designing it, I tried to take everything that was great with the original MonsterUp and make it better in small or bigger ways. The result game had it all! A purpose to all this jumping (there are levels to pass and you have to collect specific number of gems to do so – not to mention stay alive long enough), there is a small story (Skotooooooooooooooooos), the animation has double the fidelity (twice the frames actually) and the graphics are much much more awesome overall (thank you Ilias, you are awesome), there is original music (thank you Marietta, you are awesome), boss battles, an animated game map, multiple game saves, mini games and so much more!

The game has been an exclusive for Windows Phone until today. Today, I have released the game for Android phones for free. So go ahead, download and enjoy this awesome game, it won’t cost a thing. Go to Trelloland, find the Skotos minions and defeat them, it’s awesome fun, I promise you!

I was asked the other day to contribute to an article by 148Apps.com about my angle on the Apple App Store. The App Store has recently turned 5 years old, and it was where it all started for indie developers on mobile. Myself, I have not been on the App Store from the beginning, but opted to focus more on the Windows Phone Marketplace, which I never regretted as I have said in previous blogs. This does not mean that I have not published on other marketplaces and that I don’t have an opinion about them of course:)

You can read my thoughts, along with fellow developers thoughts about the App Store by heading to the 148Apps article page and reading the article itself, titled “App Store Fifth Anniversary: The Ups and Downs of iOS Publishing”.

According to a recent AdDuplex blog post, Windows Phone 8 is being used by more than 50% of the current Windows Phone 8. This is really interesting news, since Windows Phone 8 is a relatively new version and it caught up rather quickly. This means that the Windows Phone market share is rapidly expanding, now more than ever. In the US, the numbers are even more interesting since Windows Phone 8 users account for 70% of all Windows Phone users, but this actually means that not many people were considering Windows Phone before the awesome Lumia 920. But how do these numbers look from an everyday Windows Phone developer, like, say, me ?

In my case, WP8 looks much smaller than this. For the past month, only about 20% of my users for MonsterUp Adventures were using Windows Phone 8.

May 13-June 13 2013 – MonsterUp Adventures WP OS

The month before that, the number was about 16%. For the original MonsterUp the numbers are pretty similar, with 18.4% and 10% respectively.

May 13-June 13 2013 – MonsterUp WP OS

So what can I understand from these numbers? For starters, Windows Phone 8 is a much bigger success and is working much better than Windows Phone 7.x when it comes to customer acquisition. The other thing of course is that people who used to play my games, still love them and still play them :)