Temple Run hits 100M downloads in its first year

Folks, it seems we have yet another addicting smartphone and tablet game on our hands. A year after its launch, Temple Run has had 100 million idol-snatching fans out there eager to collect coins while dodging wild demonic monkey attacks. Imangi Studios has just confirmed that a third of these are Android users. To be exact, 32 million of these downloads are from Android devices, while 68 million are from iOS.

Since August 2011, more than 10 billion sessions of the game have been played, which results in an average of about 100 games per user. Imangi says these amount to almost 54,000 person-years spent playing. That’s a lot of years spent monkeying around!

Keith Shepherd, Imangi Studios co-founder, says the company never expected that a lot of people would want to spend their time running away from monkeys, jumping up, sliding down and collecting coins. “We never imagined that the game we were making and loved would be so well received around the world,” he said in a statement.

Freemium is the way to go

Temple Run first came out in August 2011 as a paid app via the Apple App Store at $0.99 per download. Imangi then switched to a freemium model in September, and reached a million downloads in just three days.

Temple Run then became number one free app in the Apple App Store by end of 2011, and was the #1 grossing app by January 6, 2012.

The Android variant took some time to launch, but was available on Google Play as of March 2012 and on the Amazon App Store as of May. Google Play downloads have a 30% share, while Amazon gets a small minority of 2%.

Imangi has since released updates to the original Temple Run game, including an update for the new iPad and the latest Temple Run: Brave, which is a collaboration with Disney Pixar in combining elements from the game and the studio’s latest Brave animated motion picture. You can check out the infographic prepared by Imangi for the skinny on how successful the game’s run has been, so far. We also published a quick Temple Run game review a few weeks back.

Games like Temple Run prove that the freemium model works well in making a game wildly popular once it reaches the tipping point. While $0.99 is cheap enough for the mass market, most players would still want to download apps and games for free. Meanwhile, more serious gamers (or users) will tend to spend more on in-app or in-game content, such as coins and in-game features.