Game Played by 30 Million People Released for iPad & iPhone
Cupertino, CA (PRWEB) July 09, 2015 -- The world’s No.1 Mahjong game , which has entertained more than 30 million people worldwide , is today available as an iPad and iPhone app in the United States.
Mahjong, one of the world’s oldest and most popular games, which some say originated in China as early as 500BC, is now played by people of all ages from across the world. In the last month, almost a million players from 215 countries, have played the game on the publisher’s website.
“People have been asking for a mobile version of Mahjong for a long time”, says Alx Klive, Founder of Affinity Media, publishers of the app and website. “We’re happy to be finally releasing it in the US, for all our US players”.
Original Mahjong™ takes the same simple, but confoundingly addictive gameplay, that has entertained millions on the website, and replicates it precisely for the iOS version. “We worked really hard to replicate the same gameplay and tile generation as the web version. We had to completely rewrite the game from scratch, moving from Flash, and it was much harder than we thought to keep the subtle difficulty aspects the same. It was also tempting to add bells and whistles, but a lot of apps make this mistake, and lose the essence of what made a simple game great fun to begin with.” says Klive.
The game was initially test released in Canada and New Zealand last month. It quickly reached the Top 20 iPad Games in both countries, reaching No.2 in the Strategy category in New Zealand, and No.6 in the Puzzle category in Canada .
“We were surprised by the success in Canada and New Zealand. It’s our first app, and we know it’s really hard to break through all the ‘app noise’. We collected 15,000 email addresses from users of our web version over the course of the last few months, and that really helped. Capturing people’s App Store country via our web form, and going one country at a time in terms of marketing and releasing, has also been key to us as independent developers, allowing us to focus our efforts productively and sensitively on each region (and culture) at a time. For example in Canada we were able to draw on our Canadian roots (we cracked a joke about Poutine) and in New Zealand we referenced the cities where we knew we had lots of players already.”
The game is available in the U.S app store today. An Android version is in the works for later this year.
Links for Journalists:
App on iTunes Store: http://apple.co/1IBMB8S
App website: http://originalmahjongapp.com
Web version: http://freemahjong.org
Photo Pack (Hi-Res images): http://originalmahjongapp.com/files/press-pack.zip
CONTACT:
Founder Alx Klive is available directly for journalists on deadline. Call 1-800-686-6770 for quick answer, or email press [at] smashing [dot] com.
About Affinity Media
Affinity Media is an independent and privately owned digital publishing and online advertising company, started in the UK and Ireland, now based in San Francisco, which develops websites and apps reaching 5 million unique users each month. One of the top 1,000 website networks in the world , and recently celebrating its 10th Anniversary, Affinity Media has served over 1 billion page views since launch.
Mark Johnson, appshout! on behalf of Affinity Media Inc, +1 408 757 0156, [email protected]
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