News

Multiplayer iPhone FPS Eliminate Pro shifts 500,000 downloads in under a week

Shoots up the charts

Multiplayer iPhone FPS Eliminate Pro shifts 500,000 downloads in under a week
|
| Eliminate Pro

The title says it all, really. Eliminate Pro, ngmoco’s much-hyped multiplayer FPS, has been downloaded more than half a million times since it went live on Monday.

In fact, it had been downloaded that many times yesterday when ngmoco CEO Neil Young spoke to TechCrunch. If it’s kept up that brisk pace throughout today it must now be approaching 700,000.

What might account for this extraordinary feat of unit-shifting? For one thing, Eliminate Pro has received a hell of a lot of press. And for another, it’s free to download, giving prospective players virtually no reason not to do so.

Eliminate Pro aims to make its money through in-app payments - specifically, players are encouraged to buy power cells to level up their characters. In Young’s view, such payments are, “built into the compulsion loop of the game.”

It’s an innovative and canny approach. Rather than paying for a game once and then experiencing unmonetised pangs of compulsion thereafter, gamers are expected to get hooked on a freebie and pay for their resultant pangs. Drug dealers are known to employ a similar commercial strategy.

“We think at the end of the day this is the best way to build a big business on the iPhone,” Young says.

Mobile-Ent.biz
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.