But for Contraband Police, a popular game Prologue was a) already good and b) improved on multiple times, and Gromadowski said they “listened to the gamers”. Titles like Coal Mining Simulator - pretty good idea, btw - struggle to live up to the idea and initial ‘target gameplay’ trailers. And when I asked him how the title was devised, Gromadowski said: “I remember I came up with the general idea of a policeman checking the vehicles, and Krzysztof Kostowski (PlayWay CEO) was behind the contraband theme and the game name itself.” It’s a really clever and catchy hook.Ĭrazy Rocks did a lot of gameplay iteration to crack the formula: where game concepts handed out from the PlayWay mothership often fail is in execution. PlayWay’s game designs are partly top-down, and maybe that’s good? PlayWay is ruthlessly focused on commercial ideas. But the game also “introduces the wide scope of police work” with manual physical checking of cars, and even some driving/chasing gameplay. The game significantly expands on the ‘ Papers, Please ’ subgenre: yes, we think document-checking is a subgenre! And the core gameplay, as Gromadowski agrees, is just that - making sure shady types have the right passport info to pass your checkpoint. We reached out to Crazy Rocks founder Staszek Gromadowski to find out how this tiny Polish dev - three devs at the start, five towards the end - created a big Steam hit: How? Perhaps we can work it out by diving into why Contraband Police has been such a smash. Some publicly traded Polish game companies have faded, but PlayWay, with a market cap of around USD $670 million, has weathered the storm better than most. We wrote about them back in 2021, explaining how they leverage a web of tiny development companies - some listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange - to make hyper-targeted sim games. Polish publisher PlayWay continues to be a fascinating subject. “On April 4, Crazy Rocks announced that Contraband Police had sold 250,000 units since its launch on March 8… 49,000 copies of Contraband Police were sold in the first 24 hours, according to PlayWay CEO Krzysztof Kostowski. As Game World Observer noted a few days ago : For those who don’t know, Crazy Rocks’ & PlayWay’s ‘80s communist ‘bust those smugglers’ sim Contraband Police has been one of the standout new releases of March for Steam.
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