“That’s a team, gentlemen, and either, we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as robot individuals.”
Over the weekend, Mode 7 posted a video with a big, meaty update to their turn-based sci-fi football sim Frozen Cortex, which has been available on PC early access since last year. The creators of Frozen Synapse (our 2013 Multiplayer Game of the Year) have made positive noises in the past about eventually bringing Frozen Cortex to mobile as well, and I wanted to know how likely it was that we’d see robot cyber-football on our iPads this year.
So I talked to Mode 7’s Paul Kilduff-Taylor, and here’s what he told me.
Originally announced as Frozen Endzone back in 2013, Mode 7 have always planned on bringing their followup to the wildly successful Frozen Synapse to tablets. “What we’re finding with the iPad version is that there is a market for deeper games,” founder Paul Kilduff-Taylor wrote for us back then.
A couple of years on, and Kilduff-Taylor is still gung-ho about mobile as a platform for core gaming. “Frozen Synapse has done really well on iPad: definitely above expectations,” he told me yesterday.
See? Bullish. Er, until we talk about phones, anyway. “However, [Frozen Synapse] hasn’t done well on iPhone, despite other similar titles having good results: we honestly have no idea about why that is. It’s a great version of the game and we’ve had a lot of positive feedback from it: it just doesn’t sell.”
But Mode 7’s plans for a port of Frozen Cortex to tablets is moving right along, and Kilduff-Taylor urges other indie devs to follow in his wake. “I definitely think tablets are a great place for strategy games: you can even do fairly well with a pay-once (ie non-F2P) title, if it’s the right thing. I would definitely urge other devs to look into tablet versions, particularly of 2D strategy games, as there’s certainly an audience out there.”
Mode 7’s slow-but-steady approach to development means that we shouldn’t expect to be playing Frozen Endzone on tablets for a while yet, but you can follow its progress on the game’s website or on Mode 7’s Twitter account.
