iPhone Game of the Year award translates into 16,000 new players a day for NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower

Since being selected as the iTunes Rewind iPhone Game of the Year, the free-to-play game Tiny Tower has seen its daily active user count grow by more than 16,000 players a day, according to NimbleBit co-founder Ian Marsh.

The game now has more than 1 million daily active users, up from the 600,000 it had in mid-December, and just passed nine million total downloads. One million of those downloads have come in the last 30 days, a statistic that handily illustrates what many developers already suspected — an endorsement from Apple can be extremely lucrative.

Tiny Tower’s conversion rate has also been impressive, as Marsh tells us approximately 50 percent of downloaders in the past month have become active players, making the game the most popular it has ever been.

“It