About Agar.io I didn’t find out from the press. The link to the then only browser game was thrown to me by a programmer working on the floor above. “Write about her,” he offered me with emphasis. “Not the format,” I said and forgot about the project.
And what was there to write about? About the fact that the user is playing for a bacterium that grows by eating the bacteria of other players, thereby at the same time becoming slower and clumsier? About, in fact, massively multiplayer Osmos with conditional graphics?
In general, the eye is not hooked. And not just mine. The game went completely unnoticed by the profile – gaming – press, which did not hurt at all Agar.io to turn into a viral sensation, which in the second month of its existence in the States alone, the number of players who are online at the same time has crossed the mark of 30 thousand.
So it’s not surprising that the game developer is a 19-year-old programmer from Puerto Rico Matheus Valadares (Matheus Valadares) – the guys from Miniclip.com . And at the end of June they released it on Google Play.
The publisher released the game very carefully: they were afraid that the servers might not withstand the load. June 28 Agar.io It appeared on Google Play only in Portugal, the next day in Spain, and only a week later it was published in France, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland and Norway.
It’s hard to say how true the fears were, but since the end of June, the game downloads have exceeded 5 million on the Android platform alone.
The number of downloads of the game marked in Google Play
In fact, on both platforms, most likely, the figure is already approaching ten.
And this is definitely not the limit, given the dominant position of the game in the top free games on iOS and the top free apps on Google Play.
Dynamics of the game in the free top games in the App Store (App Annie)
So if you haven’t played, now is the time.
What does it say? Five million users can’t be wrong?
You can download the iOS version here, and the Android version here.
P.S. “Monetization corner”: there is no IAP, only advertising, which at the moment is not half as aggressive as Ketchapp.
P.S.S. The Kotaku edition wrote about the game due to the fact that the projects were used by supporters of competing parties in the elections in Turkey to clarify relations. It’s interesting there, read it.