Astraware hits 5,000 games sold for TouchPad
Yes, that number is five thousand in sales, and yes, it is kind of a big deal. I don’t do a lot of talking about webOS for the TouchPad. That’s mostly because I don’t remember the last time that I even booted into webOS on my TouchPad. I do know however that there are still TouchPad owners that are either unable, or unwilling to put Android on their tablets. The game company Astraware had a pretty ingenious idea about porting their games to webOS for these people to play. They called it the TouchPad Totalizer.
Back in December of 2011 Astraware released Mahjong for webOS. With it came a promise and a challenge. The more people that purchased this first game, the more games Astraware would work on porting over to the TouchPad. They had different milestones setup, and each milestone meant a new game would be released. The milestones were Sudoko at 1,000 copies sold, Solitaire at 2,000 sold, OddBlob at 3,500 sold, and then Casino at 5,000 sold. They ran into a little problem when working on getting OddBlob ready for release, so they will probably have Casino released first, but still plan on finishing OddBlob.
All this work was being funded by the end user purchasing the first games released. I think that this was a great idea to encourage both the customers and the developer. It encouraged the customer to spend some money on a game that maybe they might not want, just to be able to have access to a game that they do want. It encourages the developer to make sure their game is working well enough that people will want to buy it, plus it gives them some capital to work with to get the next game developed properly. I think if more developers tried to do something like this, webOS might actually have a decent list of apps to use. Although this kind of thing will only work for those developers with multiple apps. If you are still rocking webOS on your TouchPad, look into giving some of these games a try.
[webOS Nation]
