Good Pizza, Great Pizza has been around for a decade as a cooking simulator game because it has always found new ways to keep its players engaged.
For its 10th anniversary, the company has set up a series of in-game events from November 22 to December 12, including a 10th anniversary art exhibit on December 7. Good Pizza, Great Pizza has been downloaded more than 300 million times across the globe and it is played daily by over a million players.
The company is also releasing an art book on December 7 for the cross-platform game about making pizza and running a restaurant. The art book has an in-person $10 event at Gallery Nucleus, 210 East Main Street in Alhambra, California. And the game has a merchandise sale from now until December 12 and a book presale as well.
On Steam, the game will also be on sale from November 11 to November 18 (Steam Cooking Fest) and December 19 to January 2 (Steam Winter Sale). The company has also published background music on Spotify, Youtube and Apple Music.
As for gameplay, the team constantly sets up new rewards and challenges for players. It creates new decorations, rivals and friends, and new story material and scenery involving a Pizza Town gala.
Origins
TapBlaze is based in Sawtelle Japantown in Los Angeles, and it has just 12 people. Anthony Lai started the company in 2012 and the team launched Good Pizza, Great Pizza in December 2014 on iOS and Android.
Now the company has a stable daily active user count of 1.3 million players, with bi-weekly and seasonal events happening every month. Yuni Cho, community manager, focuses on creative and organic user acquisition methods to maintain and grow users. Lai and Cho spoke at GamesBeat Summit 2024.
Fortuitous feedback
The game had a breakthrough moment in 2016. At the Game Developers Conference, the team met with an editor at Apple. Cho said that the editor offered constructive criticism about its shortcomings, which included having an innovative core idea overshadowed by its uncomfortable UI/UX, awkward localization, and stressful game balance issues.
In response, the team spent two months revamping the two-year-old game. Improvements, particularly in player session times, earned recognition from Google Play, increasing traffic for “Good Pizza, Great Pizza.” Six months later, the team presented these enhancements to the Apple editor, prompting a reevaluation. Apple then recognized the game’s potential and this significantly heightened the app’s visibility and drove additional traffic, inspiring the team to persist in further growing the game and player base.
The game was the No. 1 ranked game in South Korea in October 2018. In April 2022, the game ranked No. 1 in China, even beating Genshin Impact that month. In August 2023, it was No. 1 across apps and games in Egypt. And it has ranked in the top five in the U.S., Brazil, Italy, Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.
The game is profitable with a 40/60 in-app purchase to ad revenue model, without having ever raised any VC funding. To date, TapBlaze has published 30 games and half of its team is women. TapBlaze’s Lai grew up in Queens, New York, where pizza was a universal food eaten by people from all cultures.
The team was inspired to make a game that had the same global and diverse reach through the eyes of pizza-making. After iterations — first with My Pizza Shop and then My Pizza Shop 2 — Good Pizza, Great Pizza was finally born.
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