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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
