It was an inspiration to indie developers because it showed them the path to success without selling out to a bigger corporation. In that way, Pocket God become a perennial generator of revenue at a time when the app stores were being flooded with unsuccessful titles. They had funny titles such as “Dead Pygmy Walking” and “The Pyg Chill.” Players downloaded the updates, and through the free OpenFeint network, they could share the game with their friends, who could buy it for 99 cents. They sustained themselves by creating new episodes, delivered to users as updates to the game. So the company stayed small, and to this day, it has only nine people. But Castelnuovo never wanted to engage in “company building.” He wanted to create a lifestyle business, where he could focus on being creative.

It was something that friends could fire up to show off an iPhone. 1 on the App Store for six months, and it is ranked by Apple as the No. We thought this would be a good end of a chapter. “We decided to wrap it up, after four years working in a small team. “We’ve been building up to the apocalypse all year,” Castelnuovo said in an interview with GamesBeat. It’s one of the first titles to use OpenFeint to attract players. You play a god, lording over primitive islanders dubbed “pygmies.” You can feed them to sharks or give them fishing rods. It was rated 5 out of 5 stars and went on to debut on Verizon Wireless, Android, Windows Phone, and Facebook.

Today, it is releasing “Apocalypse, Ow,” the final content update that will be released to the Apple iTunes App Store for players to download.Ĭreated by two seasoned game developers, Dave Castelnuovo (pictured left) and Allan Dye (pictured right), Pocket God became one of the first original hit indie games on the iPhone after it debuted on Jan. After 6 million paid downloads and 1.3 million in-app purchases, mobile game studio Bolt Creative has decided it is time to call it quits on the four-year old game. The 47th update for the Pocket God mobile game will be the final one.

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