Last night, “Monument Valley” won three more awards for Visual Arts, Best Mobile, and Innovation at the Game Developer Choice Awards. Some of you, like myself, might have just heard about the game this weekend when you saw Frank Underwood playing it in an episode from the new season. However, the game has been popular since its release last spring with steady sales. From the official release:
Monument Valley introduces new game mechanics subtly, allowing players intuitively to discover their abilities and the rules of the world. Balancing difficulty and delight, the developers want as many players as possible to complete the game and see Ida’s quest through to the end.
Just hours after its appearance in the show, App Store sales jumped, too.The game costs $3.99 for the initial download and then $1.99 for additional levels once you reach a certain point. An independent blog, AppFigures, tracked the sales of downloads this week:
Creator Neil McFarland told The Daily Dot that:
[His] team was asked to make a special build of the game with only one level in it to help with logistics and continuity on set. ‘The fact that our game is woven so deeply into the plot and that the game review is read aloud just blew our minds,’ he [said], calling it ‘a really amazing feeling to have our work absorbed into another medium and used as popular-culture reference like this.’
“The Stanley Parable,” another independent game, makes an appearance this season, too. It’s good publicity and exposure for the games. No one paid to have the games featured, if anything, these gorgeous strategy games fit right into Underwood’s character this season. He’s not much of a shooter anymore. A lot of consumers were into it:
i never, ever buy apps but i bought monument valley on the strength of the house of cards cosign alone. app placement in tv is the future.
— sheldon (@jiggyraps) February 28, 2015
I can’t get through last level of #monumentvalleygame so have to wait for 5yo to get home from kindergarten to help me. #HouseOfCards
— Julia Fierro (@JuliaFierro) March 5, 2015