Israeli-developed game flies off App Store’s virtual shelves

Israeli game publisher TabTale‘s new Linebound game, released on Sunday, has been downloaded over a million times in its first 72 hours on the 120+ App Stores worldwide.

The TabTale team has racked up several app industry awards in the past year. In December, TabTale’s Airheads Jump was selected as one of the App Store’s Best of 2014 Games; in August, the company was rated as one of the Top 10 Games Publisher Worldwide (iOS and Google Play combined) by a top industry site; and, by the end of 2014, it reported that a total of over half a billion of its 300 titles had been downloaded since its first game came out five years ago.

Linebound: Life on the Line, distributed by TabTale’s Crazy Labs “casual” gaming label (Crazy Labs’ titles are aimed at teens and adults), advertises itself as a “fast-paced arcade game that requires lightning reflexes,” with networking capabilities that let people around the world play each other, and display their accomplishments on Facebook and other social media, with “endless gameplay” — all free.

Nearly all of TabTale’s downloads are based on a freemium model, with the app or game available for free and extra features available for a fee, from which TabTales derives much of the approximately $20 million of its annual revenue. In Outdoor Baby, one of its popular games, for example, users can play for free and buy virtual goods, like tents and flashlights, for real money.

The company raised $12 million in Series B funding last year, for a total of $13.5 million to date. Based in Tel Aviv, it has over 300 employees in Israel, the US, Macedonia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria, and Hong Kong.

They will now be joined by the staff of Level Bit, a Serbian computer and mobile game development studio that TabTale announced last week that it had acquired. Level Bit is the developer of w “Genesis Rising,” a title that has sold millions of copies. The Israeli company had previously acquired Coco Play Limited, an Asian gaming heavyweight with over 250 250 games, interactive books, and educational apps, and hundreds of millions of downloads.

While all apps tout their advantages, not many get the download numbers Linebound does, said Uri Golan, Brand Manager at Crazy Labs – which, objectively speaking, he says, makes Linebound, and the team that created it, standouts in an App Store ecosystem that features over a million apps. “We are very proud our team of young developers, whose first game has been the greatest success of Crazy Labs to date,” said Golan. “They are cooking up addicting gaming experiences that take mobile gaming forward and engage audiences all over the world.”

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