McDonnell combined what was at the time an unusual business model on the App Store with a pretty overt recipe for popularity: zombies plus farm sims, a mix of two popular trends audiences would grasp immediately. to monetize a free app that will get lots of exposure for ?" he says. "I thought, why not just make it completely free, and use in-app purchases. "Prior to making the game, I did have a productivity app, and I think most people were in the same boat as me in that they had a paid app on the App Store, and in-app purchases seemed like a way for their Lite versions to transition into paid much easier." "If you look at Facebook games, all of those are free, so why couldn't games be free elsewhere?"Īt the time McDonnell began work on Zombie Life, Apple had just made in-app purchases possible. He himself had been shifting his time from intensive retail gaming experiences to quick sessions on Facebook. "I transitioned to doing mobile games because the market looked very attractive, and I was looking for something new to do."Ĭreating a free-to-play game that monetized on microtransactions just seemed to make sense to McDonnell, he says, a matter of intuition rather than a business decision. Prior to that, I worked at a console gaming company," he said. " Zombie Farm was the first game I had created on my own for mobile. McDonnell and his wife designed Zombie Farm on their own - The Playforge as a studio was only built to scale at the beginning of this year, he tells Gamasutra. The freemium model is here to stay, exploding across the Flash-based web, social gaming and, in recent years, mobile gaming.Ģ010's top-grossing free game on the App Store was The Playforge's Zombie Farm, and company CEO Vince McDonnell says that victory wasn't down to any kind of metrics-savvy or in-game economy wizardry - he just made the kind of game he'd want to play and pay for.