Army of Darkness Defence being removed from the app stores. Why?

Army of Darkness Defence is one of our favourite mobile games of all time at Follow That App. You could say it played a significant part in the development of the site and the subsequent YouTube channel.

Follow That App started out as a technology news and review site and indeed if you look back through the archives you can still see a wave of articles and comments as the dot com world boomed, busted and then boomed all over again!

We’ve always been big gamers and around 2011 one game in particular was taking up far too much of our time – Army of Darkness Defence. To try and do something more productive with the time lost, we posted a video with tips on how to complete the game. This was a pivotal moment in the site, as the post attracted a flood of traffic. So we wrote up a few more posts about the game with similar results.

Not only was writing about games and apps more fun, it also helped boost the traffic. So, we turned to other games and our other great love, GTA and its mobile app incarnations.

And here we are today, 7 years or so later and the vast majority of the traffic to the site are gamers and we still get a steady stream of traffic to the Army of Darkness articles.

So, we were disappointed to read that Army of Darkness Defence is no longer going to be supported by its developers. They have now posted an update on the app stores and within the game itself saying that from April 5th 2018 it is going to be removed from the app store and from 5th May 2018 they will no longer provide support and will remove the in-app purchases from the store as well.

One silver lining is that at the time of writing, the game is still available in the store (wouldn’t it be great if it was a publicity stunt!).

We tweeted them to ask why as there is no further explanation, but at the time of writing we haven’t heard anything.

There are no doubt plenty of commercial reasons to do so, with licences expiring, in-app and ad revenue declining, other priorities. Meh.

However, the game deserves to live on and be discovered by the next wave of fans. It’s hardly been overrun with updates – only 3 after its first year. Yes, it can be costly if the likes of iOS 11 and Android 8+ require bug fixes, but even the minimum of updates could surely be supported from existing revenues.

It’s a beautifully put together game taking humour from the original Evil Dead film and combining it with just the right level of difficultly to keep you interested and engaged (a.k.a. addicted). And it’s still well loved with an impressive 4.7 star rating out of 5 on the App Store.

As we say, preserving it would be the minimum, but we’d really love to see further investment in the game. New characters, new levels, two-player local and even peer-to-peer. Even creating mobile versions from some of the other Evil Dead titles.

As one of the great mobile games, it deserves better than fading into obscurity and hopefully the developers will think again.

See above for a video with our thoughts on these developments.