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Comment by Braasch | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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...

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

It's called "shareware".

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".

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.

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