Heyzap [YC09] adds achievements to its mobile gaming platform

venturebeat.com

34 points·immad··4 comments

I have always been curious with how well Heyzap was atually doing. Their founders are really smart, they have great VCs and they tend to be super influential on Angel List, and yet the data I could find on Heyzap are not as amazing as I would have thought (10K DAU on Facebook, 200K downloads on iOS, etc...). Maybe they are actually strong on Android or I am not knowledgeable enough about mobile games to understand how well they are doing...

Yeah we're much stronger on Android. This is before my time at Heyzap, but my understanding is that Heyzap on Android was initially more popular and more profitable to sell Cost-Per-Install ads for. Thus, there was a major focus on improving the Android app and the sales team was focused on selling CPI (and SDK integrations) for Android. Since we get alot of users from people who integrate our SDKs, that further boosted the Android app.

So basically, this created a feedback loop where Android had many more users than the iPhone app. Indeed, the iPhone app didn't get alot of attention until recently, but in the last couple of months it (and the iOS SDKs) reached feature/design parity with the Android app. We also recently added a sales team member whose focus is on iOS developers, so if things go well we'll add many more users to iOS.

Thanks for your reply. I see. It's funny that you had this discrepency between iOS and Android since you could assume that many people on Android would want to play games with their friends on iPhones. Anyway....Thanks for the clarification!

I'm kinda surprised that you can launch without achievements in any kind of gaming platform these days.

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