The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was held in Las Vegas over the weekend, and Brisbane’s own Halfbrick was given an honourable mention at Microsoft’s keynote press conference. During their keynote, which was live streamed across the internet to millions, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer mentioned Halfbrick’s enormously successful title Fruit Ninja a number of times. I’m sure that will help boost their sales which already place them as the #1 highest-selling title for Windows Phone 7.
The folks at Microsoft clearly know the key to a successful mobile platform launch, so they contacted Halfbrick to negotiate a port of Fruit Ninja. Not only has the game consistently held a place as one of the Apple App Store’s top selling games, but Phil Larsen (Halfbrick’s Marketing Director) mentioned to Brenna Hillier over at VG247 that they are currently the highest selling title for Windows Phone 7 as well!
“We’ve got contacts at Microsoft, and as they were launching Windows Phone 7 they wanted it to compete with the iPhone – it’s the next big mobile platform. We like what Microsoft does, and we were happy to port Fruit Ninja to it…We brought it over, and we provided a bunch of good assets and information. It was released on December 22nd, so it’s only a couple of weeks old, and it’s done really well so far. It’s the number-one selling game on Windows Phone 7.”
Phil went on to compare the challenges of developing for Windows Phone 7 to Android in terms of the need to accommodate for different devices with different specs running the operating system. He also hinted at more titles from Halfbrick’s portfolio getting ported over to Windows in the future, depending on time constraints, and other opportunities they have in different mobile areas.
This is definitely great news to see a local Aussie game developer getting this kind of international spotlight and attention, and we look forward to seeing what Halfbrick have in store for the future.