I think I have to coin a new term here. “Free” in iOS-land (and, growingly, in every gaming market) means “ad-supported” or “microtransactions.” Free-to-play (F2P) is frequently just contracted down to Free’ as well.
Yesterday, IceBurgers went 4RealsFree. No ads, no microtransactions, no demo, no lite version. The full game. In all it’s glory. Free.
I did this because I’m an amazing philanthropist and I figure I want to do right by the world.
Naww, I’m just joshing. IceBurgers was submitted to IndieCade for judging ages ago, and it’s a big pain in the butt for me to generate download codes for every judge that wants to play. Since the game wasn’t making any money anyway (I’m lucky if I get one purchase per day), I figured… Why not make it free? Totally free?
If you like it, all I ask is you buy me a can of coke or something the next time you see me. Or send me a postcard. Anything.
Here’s the link to IceBurgers in the AppStore.
EDIT: IceBurgers has rocketed up the charts and gotten a lot of press attention. Finally. Note that I got absolutely zero press attention when I was launching the game.
Guess since you weren’t making any money this was a good decision. Especially seeing as how you just mentioned it has recently gotten a lot of press attention. (myself included). Sucks that that is the way it works out though. Launch the game, no attention. Make it free, loads of attention but without monetization.
Having a lot of fun playing IceBurgers. :)
Do you have plans on monetizing it somehow later, or is it essentially going to just be promotion for Radial Games?
Monetizing it would take time and effort I don’t have. Preparing for PAX!
I downloaded IceBurgers after seeing it on AppsGoneFree. I’m enjoying the game a lot, but my only frustration is that I con’t figure out how the bonus scoring works. Is this info published anywhere?
Each letter is worth, loosely, something similar to Scrabble tiles. There’s also a score multiplier in the top-left corner: it decays over time, so the faster you spell things, the bigger the multiplier is.
The maximum multiplier is x10 (x11 in special circumstances).
There is also a significant penalty for spelling 3 letter words… they do stack up your multiplier though, so they can be used strategically.