Kitefold

The challenge

Clients increasingly ask us for something playful: a branded mini-game for a promo campaign, a game inside a loyalty app, a quiz that people actually finish. To do that well, we wanted to walk the whole path ourselves — from the first sketch to the store page, player reviews and earning money from a game.

So we set ourselves a brief: a calm game you can play one-handed in a queue, that people want to come back to every day, and that pays for itself.

What we did

• Simple controls: hold to rise, let go to glide — learned in five seconds, satisfying for weeks
• 120 hand-crafted levels across four seasons, with new winds and obstacles every few stages
• Daily challenges and weekly leaderboards that give players a reason to return
• Hand-drawn paper art and a soft soundtrack; the game works offline and is gentle on the battery
• A fair business model: free to play, optional kite designs and a one-time purchase to remove ads
• A friendly first-time experience with no walls of text, tested with players aged 8 to 70

The result

• 41% of players come back the next day
• 180,000+ downloads without paid advertising
• An average rating of 4.7 on the App Store and Google Play
• The same approach now powers branded mini-games for our clients’ campaigns

Kitefold is our playground. Everything we’ve learned about keeping people engaged — from the first second to the hundredth day — now goes into our clients’ games and apps.

The Daxive team