Company Announces $30,000 Prize For Solving iPhone Game 85
dlpasco writes "Puzzllotto. The game, styled after titles such as Myst and Zork, will be available in the iPhone App Store later this week for $4.99. 10% of the sales revenue from the game will go to the Madagascar Fauna Group. At this point, only US citizens may participate in the contest but it has been stated that UL wishes to make future events world wide. 'Even though Puzzllotto represents a significant investment of engineering and legal resources, the company refuses to apply for patents on any invention. Instead, the company hopes to share its investment with other developers through its fundware.info site, while the company's ten employees hope Puzzllotto will raise enough money to capitalize bigger dreams.'" This could also be seen as a test for greed, since the prize money will only start at $1,000 and will grow by $1,000 each day for 30 days, at which point, if no one has solved it, the entire pot will be donated to charity.
Re:The prize is ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Will this work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at Trism, which also sells for five bucks. The guy who made it has brought in over a quarter million already (as of when the article about him was written, at least a month ago), and I believe that's after Apple's fees. Granted, he had it out as a demo on the Jailbroken phones and got a lot of good advertising that way, not to mention the fact that he made a very damn good product.
Any app which has developers (in the plural) behind it is certainly expecting to be profitable. There are plenty of apps released by hobbyists, but there are also tons more that are being produced by real companies, and you can be damn sure that they're not doing it for charity.
I've only briefly poked with the SDK (I specialize in web work so it's a bit trickier to pick up coming from that whole coding style), but it seems easy enough to work with especially if you have prior Cocoa experience. Given that 9000 copies of an app sold means, by most reasonably-current estimates, that you sell only one copy for more than every thousand iPhone owners, that number hardly sounds unattainable if you have a product that doesn't completely suck. Tell your iPhone-owning friends, have them tell their friends... it'll go by that mark in no time if it's worth its salt.
Then go make an offer like this, and get all of the otherwise-free advertising? This is brilliant marketing. $30k for millions of views, and giving people a financial incentive to buy? Again, content is king, but if the game is any good they'll probably sell 50k+ copies thanks to this.
Re:Will this work? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why it's called puzzLOTTO. Ever notice how people will drive for hours and stand in line just to pay the moron tax when the PowerBall lotteries announce that the next payout is going to be tens of millions?
For sure someone will buy the app on day 29, planning to solve it in time to get the $30k.
Sensible (Score:1, Insightful)
Think of it as marketing costs, which would usually be significant. They already recouped 30,000 plus just by getting this post in Slashdot.
And stand to generate further coverage publicity in wider online media and blogs and that alone will be worth multiples of 30,000, all leading to more coverage, consumer interest and sales.
Better than squandering it on the mobile ad networks, PR or placement on iTunes.
Re:Link omitted (Score:0, Insightful)
One the one hand, you're not a lawyer. On the other hand, United Lemur says it has retained "the best promotions attorneys on the planet."
So probably there are some nuances to this thing you don't know anything about and you should just stop talking.