Youtube personality, CaptainSparklez, (as Jordan Maron is known on the Internet) has become quite famous these last few years and boasts close to 8.8 million subscribers and 1.8 billion views on his channel. Recently, he has shifted from creating Minecraft videos (his Minecraft-style parodies of many popular songs have garnered many views) to creating his own games. To that end, he co-founded the firm Xreal and has launched the first game out of the new company, Fortress Fury (Free). As a recent Guardian article notes, though, the game may have been downloaded over two million times since it was launched on iOS and Android in May, but the F2P game hasn’t really brought in the revenue one would expect from a game with such a popular name behind it; Fortress Fury still hasn’t broken into the 200 top-grossing iOS games in the US.

The game is a real-time online multiplayer game where each player crafts weapons and items for his or her fortress and then sets upon destroying the other player’s fortress. In an attempt to get his viewers involved, CaptainSparklez put the game’s title, logo, and icon art to a vote on his channel, a move that definitely helped in the game getting downloaded over two million times. However, I think that in his explicit attempt to make the game player-friendly and not pay-to-win, CaptainSparklez may have made the F2P elements too gracious, which is perhaps why the game’s revenue doesn’t seem to match the revenue many would expect to see from a game developed by someone so popular.

It might be surprising, perhaps, that he didn’t go with a premium game instead of a F2P one, since an up-front price could have translated his popularity into higher revenue, but to his credit, it seems that his game is, indeed, not predatory F2P. Perhaps, a game like this one would have made much more money a few years ago, but with the App Store being so competitive now, even a game by CaptainSparklez has to (relatively) struggle for attention and revenue.