Gamers are downloading Temple Run 2 in the millions, but it’s a Japanese game from GungHo Online that is raking in the cash.

Match-three role-playing game Puzzle & Dragon pulled in the most revenue on both iOS and Android in February, according to app-tracking firm App Annie. This is despite not even placing on the top 10 most-downloaded game charts for either operating system last month.

GungHo was the highest-earning developer on Google Play in February and the second highest on iOS.

With its multiple millions of downloads across iOS and Android, Temple Run 2 no longer cracks the top 10 app by monthly revenue. As ubiquitous as developer Imangi’s endless runner is, it’s monetization doesn’t generate income as efficiently as other games.

Of course, Minecraft: Pocket Edition, which sells for a flat rate, is the sixth highest-grossing iOS game for February. So monetization isn’t everything.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Angry Birds, schmangry birds — Temple Run 2 reached 50 million downloads in almost a third of the time it took that physics-based puzzle game.

Developer Imangi Studios announced today that Temple Run 2, the free endless-running game for iOS and Android, reached 50 million downloads in 13 days. That beats the previous fastest record of 35 days set by Angry Birds Space in April.

Temple Run 2 launched on iOS devices on Jan. 17. It hit Android devices a week later on Jan. 24. The developer announced that it hit 20 million downloads on iOS on Jan. 21. The app already reached more 10 million downloads on Google Play in its first week on that market.

“Temple Run has evolved into something so much bigger than us,” said Imangi co-founder Keith Shepherd. “The game has performed beyond our wildest dreams, and we are thrilled that gamers and fans have embraced Temple Run 2 in such a short period of time.”

Temple Run 2 is free, which obviously removes a significant barrier to entry and helps boost these astronomical download numbers. The mobile title is already No. 22 on the top 100 highest-grossing apps on the Google Play market and No. 8 on the same chart on the iOS App Store. Imangi monetizes the product by selling in-game coins, items, and characters.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That really popular endless-running game — Temple Run 2 — is finally on Android.

Developer Imangi Studios just told GamesBeat that its newest title is finally live on Google’s mobile operating system. It’s available on the Google Play market and Amazon Appstore for free. The popular game launched on iOS last week where it reached 20 million downloads in just four days.

You can reach our review of Temple Run 2 here.

Temple Run 2 is a sequel to one of the first big 3D endless-running games on iOS and Android devices. Smartphone and tablet users downloaded the original more than 170 million times across all platforms. Disney partnered with Imangi Studios, the game’s developer, to capitalize on the popularity for a version of the game branded to promote the Pixar movie Brave. More than 500,000 users downloaded that version for 99 cents.

While Temple Run 2 is free to download, it jumped as high as No. 2 on Apple App Store’s top-grossing apps chart. The original game on iOS went for 99 cents when it launched, but quickly switched to a free-to-play model that greatly increased its revenue.

It took a week after the iOS release for Imangi to get Temple Run 2 out on Android. Fans of the series might feel like that was a long wait, but it’s minuscule compared to the six-month gap between when iPhone got the original and when Android did.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I don’t think I could give away 20 copies of a game I made, and yet people downloaded Temple Run 2 20 million times since its Thursday launch.

That is a huge start for the sequel to one of smartphone gaming’s biggest hits.

Temple Run 2, an endless-running game available now on iOS and soon on Android, is a free download on the App Store. Of course, that lack of a price tag hasn’t stopped it from reaching the third spot on the market’s highest-grossing apps list thanks to in-game item sales.

“The response from fans has been overwhelming,” Imangi cofounder Keith Shepherd said in a statement. “We are thrilled players want more of the Temple Run universe, and we hope to grow and expand the game over the coming months.”

Users have logged over 210 million gaming sessions in Temple Run 2 so far. The developer points out that gamers have spent a combined 1,775 years playing it.

Gamers downloaded the original Temple Run over 170 million times across Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play Market, and Amazon’s Appstore. The 20 million number for Temple Run 2 only represents the four-day total on iOS. Imangi will release the Andoid version later this week.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Disney announced its version of a Skylanders-like game featuring characters from the company’s various intellectual properties, President Barack Obama urged Congress to research the effects of violent video games on children, and the Internet takes Dead Island: Riptide to task over a controversial preorder bonus.

News:

• The DeanBeat: Disney starts a cross-platform toy war with Activision
• Kingdom Conquest II primer: How to protect yourself and dominate your enemies
• Rumor: The next PlayStation is more powerful than the next Xbox
• WGT partners with NBC’s Golf Channel for online golf game
• Déjà vu: New bill would give ESRB video game ratings the force of law
• Diablo III’s director is moving on (but is staying at Blizzard)
• Animal Crossing: New Leaf and more missing from Nintendo’s Q1 release list
• Disney Infinity: Made possible because Disney owns all of this
• Chartboost shines a light on holiday app performance (infographic)
• Gamewise connects gamers with a social experience and a reference tool
• German Facebook page leaks possible Star Wars 1313 release info (UPDATED)
• This week in the Nintendo Download: Fire Emblem, Crash Mobs, and Kirby
• Poll: Tell us what you want in a next-gen console
• Fallout: Coming soon to a TV near you?
• Ubisoft and New Regency team up again for the Splinter Cell movie
• Coming in October: GamesBeat 2013 — ‘The Battle Royal in Gaming’
• Sony exec confirms a new PlayStation announcement could come this spring
• Xseed completes Operation Rainfall trilogy with Pandora’s Tower this spring (updated)
• Obama: ‘Congress should fund research into the effects violent video games have on young minds’
• World of Tanks introduces Chinese armor with newest update
• Watch the Disney Infinity figures wiggle in 3D
• Nintendo to merge console and handheld divisions
• PlayStation Vita’s Wake-up Club is your new social alarm clock
• Dead Island Riptide developer apologizes for special edition’s severed torso statue
• BioShock Infinite on PC scales down to run on integrated graphics cards
• Apple: ‘Want to criticize religion? Write a book’ — don’t make a game
• Game acquisitions set new record at $4B in 2012, but investments tumble 57 percent
• Imprisoned Arma III devs free on bail
• We should inspire game developers to create alternatives to violent entertainment
• Homosexuality in Star Wars: The Old Republic is separate but unequal

 Mobile News:

• Match wits with Mike Tyson and other celebrities in interactive game-show app Braindex
  
• King.com’s Candy Crush Saga beats Zynga with top social-mobile game
• NRA pulls bait-and-switch with iOS shooting app
• Ad giant Interpublic invests in mobile-rewards startup Kiip
• The spendy social gamers of Anchorage (and other facts about mobile gaming habits)
• Mobile-app advertising platform SponsorPay doubles revenue in 2012
• Kabam acquires Vancouver studio Exploding Barrel Games

Interviews:

• How Rick Thompson became the über investor for gaming (interview)
• Tomb Raider’s multiplayer takes a different direction (video interview)

Reviews:

• Temple Run 2 prefers sure footing to leaps of faith (review)
• Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable brings B-movie fun to the Vita (review)
• Offensive Combat pumps out laughs and bullets in equal measure (review)
• DmC: Devil May Cry brings the sexy back to demon killing (review)

Previews:

• Oculus Rift is virtual reality that won’t make you barf (hands-on preview)

Community Spotlight:

• The Dead Island: Riptide reaction was an equality fail
  
• The backlog blues: What happens when you can play it all
• Milkshake Resolved: A Dead Island Riptide poem
• Dishonored’s use of tired storytelling devices shows that game narratives are stale
• Cyberpunk’s old-school order: The history and future of the tabletop games
• The most popular video games are also the most violent
• Honoring your game characters’ deaths is about respecting yourself
• Memorable quotes from video game history
• The future of gaming: What gun violence means to the industry
• Second glance: Investigating the creation and failure of Damnation with lead designer Jacob Minkoff
• 4 things we may never see again in video games

Pieces of Flair: 

• Video games and libraries are a good mix, say librarians
• The funniest Achievements and Trophies ever, part four: I see what you did there
• The funniest Achievements and Trophies ever, part three: That’s so meta
• The funniest Achievements and Trophies ever, part two: Murder is fun(?)
• The funniest Achievements and Trophies ever, part one: Failures
• GamesBeat’s PlayStation 2 memories
• The Kickstarter Hall of Shame: Crazy gaming gadgets
• The ideal Mega Man vs. Street Fighter game would look like this (gallery)

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Despite it being based around a premise that has been cliché since the release of Pitfall! 30 years ago, iPhone and Android users have downloaded Temple Run 170 million times, making it one of the few legitimate blockbusters of mobile gaming. It’s even a board game! How many console titles get turned into board games these days?

Now, the developers at Imangi Studios are ready to let you loose in another endless maze in pursuit of treasure you’ll never get with Temple Run 2, but is it a worthy successor or just a dull rehash of something you’ve seen countless times before?

A little bit of both, actually.

What you’ll like

It’s more Temple Run
Despite its popularity, the original Temple Run was hardly unique. You can’t throw a dollar at the App Store or Google Play without hitting a dozen games where you run toward an unreachable goal while collecting some form of currency along the way. What set Temple Run apart was its simplicity. It dropped you into an ancient temple with only one specific goal: run from the evil demon monkeys that are chasing you. To do this, you swipe left or right to make turns and up or down to dodge obstacles, and you tilt your device to guide the protagonist (Guy Dangerous) through strings of golden coins that you can use to buy upgrades between runs.

Temple Run 2 changes barely any of this. OK, you are now fleeing from one giant demon monkey, the graphics look a lot nicer, and there are a few new types of paths that change things up (more on those later), but the game is essentially the same. Swipe to turn or dodge, tilt to get coins, use your spoils to buy upgrades, and then run again to try for a higher score. This is the best route Imangi could have taken, and it calls to mind the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to sequels that has worked well for titles like Left 4 Dead 2 and, well, almost everything Nintendo has ever done.

Also, like its predecessor, Temple Run 2 is free to play in the best way possible. The things you can spend real money on — coins and gems (which upgrade your power-ups and can grant you extra lives) — are both readily available in the game itself, meaning you only ever need to pay for something if you’re lazy and want to unlock things without earning them (which isn’t too hard, anyway).

Characters and power-ups
Temple Run 2 doesn’t have any new unlockable characters — in fact, it has fewer than the original does — but each one comes with his very own special ability that you can trigger in-game after collecting a certain number of coins. The vanilla explorer Guy Dangerous can activate a shield that will protect him from running into things for a short time, Scarlett Fox can use a speed boost, Barry Bones (I assume he’s a forensic anthropologist who plays baseball) gets a 50-coin bonus, and She-Ra cosplayer Karma Lee gets a 500-point score bonus.

These special abilities are easily the most useful new addition as they allow you to tailor the experience to give you more effective power-ups more often. Instead of stumbling on a magnet item (which draws coins to you), you can trigger one when you see a big chain coming up or use the boost ability to quickly pass through a difficult stretch.

More diverse paths
The original Temple Run was all about straight lines and 90-degree turns. Sure, sometimes you’d jump off the stone temple floor onto a raised platform of mud and wooden planks, but nothing was really different about it. The sequel shakes all of that up with revolutionary concepts like hills, valleys, and gradual curves. While running over a hill is no different from running across a level platform, it does make the game more visually interesting. It sells the idea better (if only slightly) that you’re running down a path carved through natural environments instead of just a maze floating in space.

The developers have also included two completely new path types: zip lines, which are basically opportunities for you to take a breath since you won’t run into any danger on them, and minecart rides (apparently Imangi finally got around to seeing Temple of Doom). The minecart sections are the best part of Temple Run 2 as they’re totally different from the other areas (if you count tilting to turn instead of swiping as being “totally different”). They simultaneously cleanse your palate from running and make gameplay momentarily way more intense since the cart moves faster than you do on foot and approaches turns with much less warning.

What you won’t like

More complicated paths
Of course, the problem with introducing new paths that are more diverse is that they are also more complicated, and that means sacrificing some of the simplicity that was one of Temple Run’s greatest strengths. For example, as you head down the curved sections, the camera will turn slightly and make it a little harder to tell which side of the path you’re on. It gets easier with practice, but it can still be disorienting enough to make you hesitate a split-second longer than you would otherwise.

Also, some path sections seem explicitly designed to trick you into missing turns, which is more unfair than the normal fire-breathing statues and low-hanging branches that Temple Run usually throws at you. Making gameplay more difficult by subverting your expectations of the type of obstacles you’ll face is a good thing, but this presents you with the same obstacles and then drops the floor out before you have a chance to react.

Same Sisyphean torture
So Temple Run 2 is essentially just more Temple Run, and while that’s mostly a good thing, it does mean you’re going to spend even more time sprinting down the same never-ending road that you’ve seen a million times before (in this and similar games). Maybe it has some new hills and minecarts, but at the end of each path, you’re still going to fall to your death or get killed by a demon monkey and then start the whole thing over again. As fun as it is, you’ve seen it all before.

Conclusion

For the sequel to one of the most successful mobile games in recent memory, the developers of Temple Run 2 took a safe approach: more of the same. Sure, it has better graphics and a new power-up system, but at its core, it’s a lot like the original. These small additions are good for the most part, but they do sacrifice some of the elegant simplicity that made Temple Run so much fun. In the end, Temple Run 2 is at least as enjoyable as its predecessor, but it doesn’t feel new enough to be the next great mobile-gaming sensation.

Score: 79/100

Temple Run 2 was released on the iOS App Store on January 17, 2013, and will be coming to Android platforms soon.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Temple Run is gigantic. Players downloaded the first game over 170 million times. The breakout smartphone endless-running title has a daily active user number in the multiple millions.

Suddenly, we have Temple Run 2. It’s an iOS and Android sequel to the massive hit, but we have to ask: Why do we need a Temple Run 2?

Well, because developer Imangi Studios had ideas that were too big for the original.

“We decided to work on a sequel because we were running into technology limits [with Temple Run],” Imangi cofounder Keith Shepherd told GamesBeat. ”We had to shoehorn things into something we designed in five months, something we never expected to be such a breakout phenomenon. It was getting more difficult to do some of the things we wanted to do with the game and the gameplay.”

Imangi couldn’t get Temple Run to work with simple things like hills and curved paths. The game’s structure is only capable of producing perfectly level terrain on a north, south, east, or west orientation.

“Having another app gives us a chance to have a fresh start,” said Shepherd.

Imangi Studios rewrote Temple Run 2 from scratch and worked on making the game more agreeable with future updates.

What’s new?

“The first thing that you’ll notice in Temple Run 2 is that the environments are just so much more visually rich,” said Shepherd. “We were thinking it would be really great to have more organic architecture that has some curves to it — and some hills and valleys. That makes more varied [visually] than the original.”

But beyond the technical, this new Temple Run holds many new features and character abilities.

New obstacles fill the newly upgraded world. Players must now guide the hero over rivers, across zip-lines, up hills, and even through caves in a mine cart.

Perhaps the most interesting new features are the character powers. Each character has their own special power that players can unlock and activate.

It may sound somewhat different, but Shepherd said the studio wanted to make the game familiar to fans of the original.

The Temple Run business

Imangi spent the months since the August 2011 launch of Temple Run making the game better. Now, it has a new Temple Run that it will likely give the same treatment too. So we asked Shepherd if he felt like he was only in the business of making Temple Run.

“It definitely feels like we’re in the Temple Run business sometimes,” he said. “We’re a small team, so it’s been our focus for the past few apps now. Everything’s been related to Temple Run. But we feel like we have a responsibility to our fans.”

So, for the foreseeable future, Imangi is gonna manufacture more Temple Run.

“At some point I would like to start working on some new games,” said Shepherd. “I find a lot of fun in the creative process of making new things.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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