If you love pictures, facts and mobile gaming, but hate numbers and words, Fireproof Games have released the perfect thing for your extremely specific needs. Sadly, it isn’t the next game in the Room series, but it is the next best thing – the developers of the legendary puzzle franchise have compiled an impressive infographic on The Room ($0.99), The Room Two ($1.99), and (you guessed it) The Room Three ($3.99), which breaks down the sales and success of each title from release to October 2016. It’s really fascinating to see the success of Fireproof’s games in such a statistical format, and even more interesting to be able to compare the contrasting (or not so contrasting, as the case may be) fortunes of the series, and potentially present a broader perspective of the development of the App Store as a whole.
It’s rather redundant for me to just repeat the incredible statistics that the infographic puts forward, and a lot more fun to just take a look. However, there are some interesting comparisons and observations that can be drawn from the data Fireproof have released. Firstly, the most shocking statistic is that the percentage of sales for iOS is such a vast majority, which stays relatively consistent for each of the games, despite their staggered releases over the years. While you can argue that the Android versions launched after the App Store equivalents, these gaps were only a few months long, and the proportion of sales on iPhone and iPad far overwhelm every other platform, at 71.8%, 70.1% and 76.6% for The Room, The Room Two, and The Room Three respectively (the slight increase for the latter likely owing to the fact it hasn’t reached Steam yet). You can conclude that, despite changes in the respective ecosystems over time, App Store and Google Play sales have remained relatively consistent (in comparison to each other) over time, at least in the case of a major release such as The Room.
Other statistics show that, while the first two games in the series generally have sold more copies (the first admittedly being buoyed by its temporary free promotion), The Room Three actually had the most successful initial release of the series, with both the largest day one launch, and the best day sales to boot. The Room Three is also surprisingly bigger than the other two games, and while the difference in both content and quality is evident from playing the series back to back, it’s still surprising to see The Room Three is three times as big as the original game, and significantly larger than the second, despite a similar sized team working on both games. Finally, a total of 11,648,531 downloads throughout the entire series of games only emphasises the success of Fireproof’s flagship series, as well as the strength of mobile gaming as a whole, and hopefully means the elusive The Room Four will be more than just a pipe dream in the coming few years.
