Mindstorm Studios built a puzzle hit that carries another company's name

The game at the top of Mindstorm Studios' own website is listed on the App Store under another company's name. That one fact explains most of what the Lahore studio has become: a developer with more than a hundred games behind it that now builds puzzle games a US publisher launches as its own.

A Lahore studio since 2006

Babar Ahmed and his brother Faraz founded Mindstorm in Lahore in 2006. When AFP profiled Pakistan's game studios in March 2014, the company had 47 employees. Its best known early game, Whacksy Taxi, released in 2010, had reached number one on Apple's App Store in more than 25 countries. Mafia Farm followed in 2012, and Cricket Power was the official game of the 2011 World Cup. In those years Mindstorm published its own games, which meant it carried the cost of buying players as well as the cost of making the game.

A catalogue and a claim

Mindstorm's website says its games have passed 1 billion downloads, draw more than 2.5 million daily players and number over 100 titles. These are company figures, not audited ones. The site features five games: Hexa Sort, Point Out, Block Buster, Pro Golf and Wordle. Each is rated 4.6 or 4.7 on the App Store, from 8.8 thousand ratings for Pro Golf to 842 thousand for Wordle. By ratings count, Hexa Sort, at about 218 thousand on the site, sits below Point Out at 246 thousand and Wordle at 842 thousand, so the title the site leads with is not the most rated one on the page. Ratings are a rough guide to reach, and they cover one store only. The claims also invite a simple calculation. One billion downloads across 100 titles averages 10 million downloads a title. An average hides the spread, and the ratings counts on the page, from 8.8 thousand to 842 thousand, show how uneven the catalogue is.

Whose game is Hexa Sort

On the Apple App Store, Hexa Sort is listed with Lion Studios Plus LLC as seller and Lion Studios as the copyright holder. A trade analysis by Cost Center names Lion Studios as publisher and gamebra.in and Mindstorm Studios as developers. The listing shows 4.7 out of 5 from 219 thousand ratings, and the game is free, with in app purchases and advertising.

This is a different business from Whacksy Taxi. The seller account on the App Store receives the revenue and holds the relationship with the player. In the usual publishing arrangement, the publisher also pays for the advertising that brings players in, recovers that spending first and then splits what is left with the developer. That is general industry practice, not a statement about this contract. The terms of the Hexa Sort deal are not public.

Why the split matters

Cost Center put Hexa Sort's in app revenue at about $550,000 a week in an analysis dated 9 October 2024. That is a third party estimate, not a figure from Lion or Mindstorm, and the game's current revenue is unknown. Held for a year, $550,000 a week comes to about $28.6 million. Every ten percentage points of revenue share would then be worth about $2.9 million a year. The estimate covers purchases only and is gross of Apple's commission and of the publisher's advertising spending. Apple's commission is 15 or 30 percent depending on the programme. At 30 percent, $28.6 million falls to about $20.0 million, and at 15 percent to about $24.3 million, before the publisher recovers its advertising costs. A developer's take would be a fraction of what remains.

The store listing shows what that revenue is made of. Ten in app items range from $1.99 to $14.99. There are three coin packs at $1.99, $7.99 and $14.99, a $4.99 piggy bank, a $4.99 safety net offer, a $1.99 spin wheel, and four $9.99 bundles for refreshes, tiny hexes, hammers and extra lives. The latest listed update, version 6.4.10, adds a Battle Pass and Black Friday offers, and earlier updates carried seasonal worlds. The listing carries an 18 plus age rating and flags loot boxes, which are paid random rewards and draw regulatory attention in some countries. Pricing like this is built for a small group of heavy spenders, while the wider audience is served with advertisements. A studio working on such a game is judged on how long players stay and how much they spend, as well as on how the puzzles feel.

The risks of building a publisher's hit

Three risks follow from the structure. The first is concentration. If one title carries most of a studio's income and the publisher owns the store page, the studio's name rarely reaches players, and the publisher can move later work to another team. The second is saturation. Cost Center profiles eleven competing sort and stack games, three of them from Voodoo, released between February and May 2024. The mechanic is easy to copy. The third is decay: a puzzle game that peaks in the charts holds its income only while new levels, events and paid installs keep arriving, and those costs fall on whoever runs the live service.

Against that, the arrangement spares Mindstorm the cost that has sunk many studios, which is buying players with money it does not have. Tracxn lists the company as unfunded, so it has no outside capital to spend on advertising. The Hexa Sort listing carries a 2023 copyright line, thirteen years after Whacksy Taxi reached the top of the charts under Mindstorm's own name. Working under a publisher swaps ownership of the game for access to the machinery that makes it visible.

What the studio is hiring for

Mindstorm's website lists three open roles: a 3D game artist for advertising, a product analyst and a senior game developer. The three roles cover art, analytics and development, the work that keeps a live game running. The page also links to a board with the studio's other openings and an option to register interest, and it names no office location or headcount. The website still puts Hexa Sort first among its five featured games.