Skyman

In this original game for Legal & General, you take on the role of a stunt man who has to perform at an air show for 20 days. You have to make as much money as possible before your virtual career ends.

As you earn money you can upgrade your kit but also invest in ‘insurance products’ such as better armour, stunt doubles, and life cover. Investing more in kit helps you fly further but increases risk to you, whereas investing too much too early in protection gives you less to spend on flying further.

Branding in the game is minimal, yet it adheres fully to the client’s brand guidelines. In fact the best feedback during testing was that consumers felt it was an existing game that Legal & General had sponsored afterwards. Players saw it as a game first and foremost and not as pure advertising, which was exactly the intention.

We released Skyman on March 10th 2013 on iTunes and Google Play and watched the chart position intently. We also placed the flash promo game on gamenet.com. Bearing in mind we had no promotion or features from either iTunes or Google and no paid advertising in place we were relying on organic growth of downloads and were expecting an initial spike and tail, ideally making it into the top 25 and picking up a feature from Apple.

Skyman performed even better than we could have hoped for – we watched the game climb quickly and steadily through both charts by itself, peaking within a week on iTunes as the No.1 overall iPad app in the UK. Its download growth and fall on Google Play was over a much longer period, peaking at about a month after release but following a very similar cycle. To date it’s had over 1 million plays across all platforms.