If you’re among those mobile gamers who wished more companies would release full-fledged premium games, and that your fellow mobile gamers would actually BUY said games, then this is some welcome news. Feral Interactive has announced that their iOS port of Codemaster’s 2014 racing game GRID Autosport ($9.99) has surpassed the 100,000 sales mark since it was released on the App Store in November of last year. The game is available for $9.99 with no IAP, which is a helluva deal considering the quality of the game but is at the higher end of the price spectrum on mobile and has never been on sale, so hitting the six figure mark in units sold is quite a feat.
It’s funny given the sheer scale of the mobile market and the prevalence of free to play games that a typical milestone worth making noise about is something like 10 million downloads, or 50 million downloads, or even one BILLION downloads. However, for a game that’s ten bucks up front, 100k is nothing to sneeze at. What makes it even more impressive is that there is not an Android version of the game yet, meaning a huge bulk of potential customers aren’t part of this milestone, and even on iOS GRID has some pretty high device requirements, further fracturing the amount of potential customers who could purchase the game. So really, 100k units sold is damn impressive.
On the other side of the coin, given that GRID Autosport on iOS is a port of an existing game, a lot of the cost of development was already recouped through release on PC and consoles back in 2014, so that makes it a more feasible project to sell at just ten dollars a few years later on a new platform. A fully from the ground up racing game for mobile on the same level of GRID might not be successful selling 100k at the ten dollar mark. That said, iOS is a GREAT platform for existing ports, so if anything I hope this gives more companies the confidence to port (or continue porting, really) older games from other platforms to mobile. And if you want to see just why everyone loves GRID Autosport enough to make it a six-figure seller, check out our full review from when it released.
