Dots announces iPad and multiplayer versions as the game hits 250 million plays

Dots, the addictive iOS game that came from the NYC team at Betaworks, has continued seeing upward growth stats and is announcing both a native iPad version and a multiplayer option for users to compete against each other.

Dots-multiplayer end of gameThe team behind Dots plans to announce Thursday that the game hit 250 million game plays, up from 100 million about two weeks ago, and it’s been making rapid improvements to the app since then.

Dots is launching a native iPad version, as well as multi-player option that will let several players play the same board at different times, providing a way for people to accurately compare scores. The new version also accomodates players who are color-blind. And the team said Android, and maybe an un-timed version of the game, are in the works.

Dots came out of Betawork’s hacker-in-residence program, which was designed to test out a variety of startup ideas in a short period of time to see which ones would be a success. Dots was one of the successes, and Betaworks CEO John Borthwick talked about this strategy and at our paidContent Live conference in April.

While it’s unclear how long people will remain interested in Dots, the rapid adoption and transformation of the game over the past month highlights the Betaworks strategy of quickly iterating on a good idea and putting resources behind it.

Our review of the game can be found here, and Quartz has a good dissection of the different ways to do well at Dots (just focus on the squares). The game was created by Patrick Moberg, who was experimenting with different iOS interaction designs and decided to build a game. Dots is pretty simple, giving the user 36 colored dots to connect and remove from the screen before the time runs out, and the game demonstrates the flat aesthetic that’s become so popular in mobile design recently.

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