There is something to be said for choosing to do everything independently and not giving up creative control or bowing down to outside forces. I’m one of those people who intimately understands that as over the summer my band released an album on our own and just recently I released a novel on my own after a frustrating year of negotiations with agents and publishers and feeling like I could just do better on my own. Mat Dickie is no stranger to doing things on his own, and his latest game, Wrestling Revolution, is proof that you just need to produce good content and hope it catches on to the masses before it starts to pay dividends.
Wrestling Revolution came out in July of 2012 for Android and iOS devices and since then has really taken off in an interesting way. The original game that was released was somewhat of a beta with Mat (affectionately known as MDickie) charging $.99 for the full version of the game which was getting weekly updates, or the free training mode to try out. The weekly version worked like this; every week he’d release a new card of wrestling matches, giving you the choice of who to play as in each match and watch storylines unfold. In a way it was an ingenious way to keep fans interested in the game instead of giving them everything up front.
This was all while he was working on a full career mode for Wrestling Revolution, which would allow for players to create their own character and take them through years of a career facing different challenges and having to deal with negotiations and everything in between. This time around, there was the ability to play the game for free with ads or to pay a monthly subscription of $.99 to get it ad free and to do whatever you wanted. The idea behind it was that you would pay for as long as you were playing, and if you grew tired of it, simply unsubscribe.
I can’t stress enough just how addicting this really was, I had enjoyed the game previously, but when the Career Mode update came out, I immediately subscribed to the game. To put it into perspective, your wrestler starts out in 2012 and you can just keep going until he or she fails so miserably that they are bankrupt. I have a character that I’ve been playing as consistently for a while now and is on the year 2022, granted, I did have to restart it once after he was crippled in a match and never really recovered.
For a mobile game, it was deep and engaging and really offered beyond what you could expect. This meant that it was selling well, especially on the Google Play Store. So much so that it became the most popular wrestling-related item on that Play Store and when WWE would tell fans to download their apps by searching for WWE on their programming, Wrestling Revolution would come up before any of their applications. They were embarrassed, upset and vengeful that someone without their millions of dollars, viewers, reach and history could surpass them and found any little loophole to have it taken down.
That was on Christmas and still to this day, Wrestling Revolution is not back up on the Google Play Store. Mat is now having to put up a fight to get his game back on there and the reality of it is; why should he have to? He did everything that a DIY artist could do to extend his brand and make it a success after years and years of developing popular, yet obscure, games on the PC. The game is still available on Apple’s store and for Android users they can grab it from the Amazon Marketplace as well.
Help support indie games, especially the ones that deserve your attention.
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