Developer of Tweetie launches LetterPress iPhone Game | Hacker News Reader

Developer of Tweetie launches LetterPress iPhone Game

atebits.com

45 pointsFredericJ22 comments

Further confirmation that search is completely broken in the App Store. Read about this app on my work computer, fire up the App Store on my phone, search 'Letterpress', Apple's Cards app, and a Letterpress Handbook about actual letterpresses.

Same here. Can't find the game at all on my iPhone.

Had the same problem. I just went to www.atebits.com from my device and clicked on the itunes link from the site.

It usually takes a while before new apps can be found with the full text search.

Do we know how long ago it was launched? Sometimes it doesn't populate in the app store at all for the first few hours, even though it can be accessed and downloaded from direct links.

If he just launched it'll need to be indexed first.

This isn't a case of search being broken, but rather of Apple being very bad at distributed systems, and it taking a ridiculous amount of time for new apps to fully propagate.

I find his pricing strategy for the game rather interesting. The game is free to play and contains no ads, but for $0.99, you can upgrade to a "full" version and unlock a few extra features. I think this model will definitely attract a lot of people, but I'm curious as to how many people will actually decide to pay for that upgrade (I did after about 15 minutes with the game ‒ I love it.)

From 2% to 4% used to be typical for shareware games (albeit on PC), in my experience.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were 5x or even 10x that. You've got one-click purchase, and it's only $0.99 - much easier upgrade route than on PC.

It'll be interesting to see how it works out for him. Gasketball, the new game by the two guys who made Solipskier, monetizes the same way. Selling Solipskier for $2.99 on the app store earned them a living for quite some time, but selling Gasketball as a $2.99 in-app purchase was so unsuccessful that it left them literally homeless[0].

Having Loren Brichter's name behind Letterpress will definitely help spur initial sales from the HN-type crowd that wants to support him and check out his latest post-Twitter project, but beyond that I'm interested to see if he finds success with this model.

[0]: http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/going-broke...

Being able to play multiple games at once is the killer feature. Without that it's just not fun in any sustainable way. The free version is a very limited demo in which you can do no more than test whether you like the game.

He just said on Twitter that he was "not optimizing for profit [but] curious to see how it does".

"I find his pricing strategy for the game rather interesting."

It's called "shareware".

It's interesting that an experienced app developer chose to create a game instead of a new app. Especially since the game category in iOS seems to be so saturated with free or freemium options.

Of course, I'm also surprised that experienced developers are still cranking out timer apps and weather apps. I guess it's just hard to come up with a good original app idea... much easier to fix what's wrong in the apps you use already.

Cool game. The design Looks like a windows 8 app

There's a nice interview with Loren about development and design of the game here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VbqBBiEWu8

I love the UI (as I expected) but I feel like the market for these types of multi-player apps is waning.

Best of luck, though!

We really need a robust version of Matchmaking that games like Halo have so that you're never without an opponent and a good connection.

Until Letterpress I had no use for Game Center at all, but I just used its auto-matching to start two engaging rounds with strangers. Fun game.

MS patented that matchmaking algorithm (even though it is very similar to the chess ranking algorithm ...)

Why?

Those kinds of games are perfect for mobile devices. It's fun playing several games with complete strangers, there is always something to do.

I absolutely love Lost Cities (http://lostcitiesapp.de) which is similar in the way and situations it's played (it's a very different game but it's also turn based and uses Gamecenter for matchmaking. It's also best played with several people at once.)

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