Company Announces $30,000 Prize For Solving iPhone Game

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.

Comments

Hum

[Arthur B.]

Can't someone reverse engineer the enigmas, backtrack through the puzzles and 'win' the game ?

Link omitted

[CaptainPatent]

This appears to be the most relevant site and it includes game rules. This does appear to be blatant Slashvertizing though and should probably be on the Idle page.

Re:Link omitted

[lysergic.acid]

i'd rather read "slashvertising" for an interesting and original game that helps fund a charity than slashvertisements about some crappy Microsoft mouse with a blue tracking light or more Apple product updates. really, of all the slashvertisements that get posted, this is the one you have a problem with? is it because of the lemurs? why do you hate lemurs so much?

saving lemurs > !saving lemurs.

besides, their fundware idea is pretty cool. it creates a way for software producers to be less reliant on VCs while directly involving end-users in the development process. perhaps this model will mean more products that are created for/by the average user instead of all software being made to the specifications of profit-driven CEOs and PHBs.

Will this work?

[Tony Hoyle]

How are they going to make money?

If I'm reading it right their prize pot is $30,000. They're selling at $5 a throw and apple get 1/3 of that. So to break even they've got to sell 9000 copies. Doesn't sound a lot but I bet the majority of iphone apps never get near that.

Re:Will this work?

[biraneto]

> So to break even they've got to sell 9000 copies. Doesn't sound a lot but I bet the majority of iphone apps never get > near that. That's because the majority of the iphone apps don't get "slashvertised"

Re:Will this work?

[fermion]

286 sales a day would just about pay for the prize. As the prize money increases, we would expect more sales. I would assume the expected sales versus time would have an concave shape, where at some point people just buy the game in hope of receiving the prize money, and sales go up dramatically, then likely drop significantly. It is like the lottery where lines grow grotesquely long as prize money increases.

The scam tag may be appropriate here, because they can basically engineer the game to be so easy as to insure someone can solve it in a few days, or so hard that that no one can solve it in 30 days. Sure the money will go to charity, but the actual net loss such a donation would generate after taxes and publicity benefits are unclear.

This seems like a credible piece of advertising to boost sales in a market with few opportunities to get noticed. It is low cost, of limited duration, and will encourage people to buy the product with a minimum 200X ROI, for those with a gambling mind.

Re:Will this work?

[Firehed]

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:What's required to play

[sexconker]

Text "Winner" to PLOTO to win your $30,000!!!!*

Programatically solvable?

[jonaskoelker]

Giving money to puzzle solvers has happened before. See for instance The Eternity Puzzle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_puzzle).

It'd be great if the product's home page said something about the rules of game, because then we could geek out and try to solve it programatically (if possible). It says "Puzzle" on the tin, but is it like playing Zelda or is it like the push-the-ice-blocks-around puzzle in Snowpeak Ruins from Zelda [roughly comparable to a small instance of Sokoban]?

Also, interesting, if this _is_ easy to solve programatically, we'd all be playing a big instance of something like the centipede game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_game).

Clearly you don't get it

[MisterSquid]

While in one month the company may not recover the cost of the prize, the possibility of generating enough of sales to earn a quarter of a million dollars is there.

Why do I mention $250,000? Because that's how much Steve Demeter's puzzle game Trism earned between 11 July and 18 September.

This mentioned by John Gruber on the very day.

My best guess is that if this prize money get the company many downloads, the company may easily make back it's money in the first week.