Chinese New Year usually sees a decrease in app download activity as 1.4 billion people travel home for two weeks of celebration.

But the monthly report from Android app store Wandoujia highlights one game that reversed the trend.

Carrot Fantasy 2: Ice World might sounds a bit generic, but it clocked up 1.4 million downloads on Wandoujia during a two week period in January.

That was almost triple the total of Despicable Me: Minions Rush and four times that of Cut the Rope 2.

Featured power

One important element in this success was the direct muscle of the app store itself; a deal saw the game's lead carrot character highlighted on the marketing for Wandoujia's mobile search services and the app store's new client.

There was also a nice little viral video campaign on Wandoujia's video channel with a cute girl doing the game's sound effects; something that was linked to a pre-order campaign.

The result was a peak of users at launch, and while this dropped off from 240,000 a day to 50,000 a day, daily revenues grew throughout the period.

You can read more about the apps and games that performed well on Wandoujia during January on its China App Index.