The story
The company rose to prominence in 2010 with their game Fruit Ninja; by 2012, the game was on one third of all iPhones in the United States. By 2015, the game had been downloaded over 1 billion times.
In March 2012, Halfbrick Studios acquired Onan Games for an undisclosed price to make use of their software Mandreel, which allows games to support iOS, Android, Adobe Flash and HTML5 development.
In 2013, COO Luke Muscat held a Game Developers Conference talk about a physical game, Tank Turn Tactics, that was invented to be played internally by studio employees, but had to be banned due to its impact on workplace morale. The ability to gift "action points" to allies caused factions to form within the office, leading to betrayals that made employees refuse to work together. Tank Turn Tactics was also featured in a 2021 documentary by People Make Games.
In 2017, Halfbrick Studios was inducted into the QBLHOF. Halfbrick is one of Australia's fastest growing companies, and is among Australia's most notable cultural exports. In 2020, the company announced a "complete rebuild" of Fruit Ninja with a new engine and new graphics.
In 2023, Halfbrick Studios announced that they were switching from their free-to-play into a subscription model, by launching Halfbrick+. For a monthly fee, subscribers can play all the studio's games without ads or further in-app purchases.
From Wikipedia’s article on Halfbrick Studios, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4