Gajatri Studios Releases "Yoga Retreat" On iPad

    Gajatri Studios released their new Yoga Retreat iPad app in the Finnish and Canadian markets, their first new platform since launching on Facebook’s gaming center. Yoga Retreat on iOS brings in many of the same elements as their Facebook game, but it’s not a direct port. Users still run their yoga retreat, training customers and growing the real-estate of the game, but by looking the behavior of the Facebook game users they discovered that people enjoyed taking care of the customers, so the new release focuses more on the juice bar, meditation room, and steam garden, rather than just the yoga floor.

    Yoga Retreat isn’t an “educational” game by far – you’re still hooked into the standard casual game dynamics – but the game does offer instructional animations for you to learn from, and send to your friends.

    “We hope that while you’re playing it some people will raise up from the sofa and try out the positions with their friends. It’s not meant to be an educational game, but fun but also some use to you,” says Tiina Zilliacus, CEO of Gajatri Studios.

    Their Facebook game is still alive and kicking with 50,000 monthly users, and it seems Gajatri is hitting the casual women gamer demographic well. On Facebook about 70% of their players are women, and they expect about the same ratio on iOS.

    They did release their first-day stats, but well, they’re just the first day. But to compare it to your baseline, in Canada they saw 36% first-day retention, and in Finland they’re hit the top of the Sports category in the App Store.

    We’ve been working with iOS version from early January, and our players have actually been asking for it as gaming becomes more and more mobile.

    The app is currently available as an iPad app in Finland and Canada, but they will be releasing their iPhone version in a couple weeks, with a global (and localized) launch sometime this summer.