Dots game from Betaworks hits 100 million game plays in first 2 weeks

Dots, the super-addictive iOS game from Betaworks that launched just two weeks ago, has already hit 100 million games played, Betaworks told us.

paidContent Live 2013 John Borthwick betaworks

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick and Om Malik talk about the future of Betaworks and testing new products at paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

The game came out of experimentations with iOS interactions and designs, and it’s sort of like a mobile version of Connect Four. The main screen on Dots displays 36 colored dots that users have to connect to remove from the screen, and the simplicity of the game’s design emphasizes the flat aesthetic that’s become popular in mobile design recently.

Dots comes from Betaworks as the NYC technology incubator has set an agressive schedule for releasing beta products each week for six weeks in hopes of seeing what works. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick talked about this strategy and said a game was in the works at our paidContent Live conference last month.

Our review of the game can be found here, and Zach Seward wrote a guide for Quartz dissecting the different ways a user can excel at Dots. (Hint: it’s all about the squares.) The game is free to download from Apple’s app store, with in-app purchases that gives users a few additional features. Betaworks reported that the game hit 25 million games played about a week ago.

Here’s the company’s description of how Dots got started:

About 3 months ago, Patrick Moberg started experimenting with various iOS interaction designs as part of the hacker in residence program. We didn’t set out to build a game, but quickly realized there’s a desire for well designed mobile entertainment so that’s where we focused. Patrick worked for a few weeks to build something that looked beautiful and provided you some level of stimulation. After a few days playing one of the initial concepts, we were all completely hooked. Several betaworks employees and their partners clocked hours and hours of playtime off a fairly rudimentary pilot. Over the next few months, we refined the scoring, design, and overall aesthetic to come up with what we simply call Dots – a game about connecting.