The archive · Games & Play · Product decision · 2013–2014
Monument Valley makes a game where every screen is art — $5.8M from 2.4M sales
ustwo built an Escher-inspired mobile puzzler as a 'user experience', short and gentle — 2.44M paid sales and $5.86M revenue proved non-gamers would buy art.
ustwo games
What it had to solve
Inside the London digital studio ustwo, most colleagues — smart, design-literate people — didn't play games, even on mobile. The games team realized the genre excluded them with difficulty, time demands and unappealing aesthetics, so it set out to make a game for them.
How it works
Monument Valley launched on iOS in April 2014 from ustwo games, a studio inside the London design agency ustwo. The team noticed that most of its colleagues — smart, design-literate people — never played games: they found them too hard, too demanding of time, or aesthetically ugly, and so felt excluded.
That observation became a design brief. Lead designer Ken Wong and the team treated the game as a user experience: inspired by M.C. Escher's impossible geometry and Japanese woodblock prints, they built an isometric puzzle game where every screen was composed like art, kept the whole experience short, and made challenge secondary to discovery. At GDC Europe 2014 Wong presented it under the title 'Less Game, More Experience'.
The economics proved the bet. By January 2015 ustwo reported 2,440,076 official sales and $5,858,625 in revenue against an $852,000 development cost, plus an Apple Design Award and the App Store's iPad Game of the Year for 2014 — evidence that a short, beautiful, premium-priced game could pay for itself.
Why it lands
- Starting from 'who is excluded?' made the audience question concrete, not abstract.
- Escher's impossible geometry gave a visual idea that doubled as the core puzzle mechanic.
- Shortness was a deliberate feature: more players finishing the story proved the quality-over-quantity bet.
- Publishing real cost and revenue numbers made the art-game economics visible and replicable.
What it did
By January 2015 the game counted 2,440,076 official sales and $5,858,625 in revenue against an $852,000 development cost. It won an Apple Design Award and Apple's iPad Game of the Year 2014, and became the reference point for short, premium mobile 'art games'.
What you can take
If most people are excluded by your product, don't add difficulty — remove friction: make it shorter, gentler and more beautiful, and design it for the audience you actually want.
Since then
ustwo followed with the Forgotten Shores expansion in late 2014 and kept the paid, no-freemium model, a rarity in mobile gaming. Monument Valley became a standard example in design talks, and its success helped legitimize short premium games as a viable business.
Sources
- Monument Valley out now
- Monument Valley Team Reveals The Cost And Reward Of Making A Hit iOS Game
- Designing Monument Valley: Less Game, More Experience
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