Well, this is handy. If you’re looking at doing a Kickstarter game for iOS and you want to distribute your games, for free, to your backers, Apple will now let you do this. All you need to do is ask!
Six To Start, creators of Zombies, Run! explain…
Here’s how we did it:
1. We developed two near-identical apps – Zombies, Run! and ZR Advance. Zombies, Run! is a paid app at $7.99; ZR Advance is free.
2. Before launch, we emailed all of our backers a link that allowed them to set a password for their ‘ZombieLink’ account.
3. They downloaded ZR Advance, entered their email and password, and were authenticated by our ZombieLink server; this then unlocked the appropriate content in the app.
But the most important step was telling Apple what we were going to do before we did it. We were pretty confident this plan would work and didn’t break their rules, but there was no way we were going to rely on it without getting some confirmation. Luckily, they reached out to us first because they thought the game sounded cool, so we took that opportunity to explain our issue and proposed solution. They were very helpful and in fact offered some other potential solutions, along with the advice that the free ZR Advance app must have at least some content for curious downloaders (in our case, we made some of our Codex available, plus people could look at the base).
It’s a pretty cool system, and extremely useful for those trying to wrangle a way to reward backers for their support.
Six to Start is pretty careful to warn folks that it’s not failsafe — Apple could decide to block this kind of behaviour on a whim, but it’s good to see that, for now, it’s allowing developers backed by Kickstarter to reward those who helped get their games off the ground.
Distributing 3000+ copies of an iOS game [Six to Start]
Thanks Tuaw!
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