Mobile publisher Storm8 hits a billion downloads for its casual games

Mobile game publisher Storm8 is announcing today that its games have been downloaded more than a billion times.

In doing so, the Redwood City, Calif.-based company is joining a relatively small club of companies that have had so many downloads. The company said that it is dedicated to building a “world of play” with high-quality games.

Storm8 said that hundreds of millions of its players have enjoyed more than 2 billion hours of playtime. Overall, they have had more than 76 billion game sessions.

The company said it will immortalize the player who downloaded the company’s newest hit game, Restaurant Story 2, after the milestone. It will do so by making them an in-game character, and it will send the player a new iPad Mini 3 and a billion Storm8 gems in Restaurant Story 2.

“One billion downloads is a huge milestone, unmatched by most in the mobile market, and representing close to six years of hard work and millions of hours of play,” said Storm8 CEO Perry Tam in a statement. “We wanted to mark it in a big way, by celebrating the most important reason for our success: Storm8 players, who inspire us daily to keep creating new ways to play and explore.”

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Storm8 also unveiled a new brand identity, uniting all of its game brands under the newly created “Storm8 Studios” banner. The company previously had separate studios with their own names. Storm8 has published 45 games across a variety of genres.

Storm8 recently hired Tim LeTourneau, one of the creators of Zynga’s FarmVille 2, as its chief creative officer. He will be speaking at the Game Developers Conference 2015 in San Francisco this week at a session dubbed “Perfecting The Recipe for Success: Restaurant Story 2 Postmortem” on at 2 p.m. Tuesday.

“We knew we had something special when we created Storm8,” said Tam. “Since then, we’ve grown from a self-funded start-up into a thriving mobile network of more than 45 games spanning multiple genres across Apple’s App Store, Google Play and the Amazon Appstore. We remain as excited as ever about continuing our mission to deliver joy to our players and create the largest mobile network.”

Above: Storm8 hits a billion downloads.

Image Credit: Storm8