Stumbled across this today. Its an interesting concept. The game price starts off super high, but the price of the game reduces each time someone tweets about it.
The game itself looks like rubbish. But the marketing gimick seems to be working reasonably well.
Cool idea, but the entire idea is depending on the demand for the game, which looking at this game and their artistic sensabilities given their eye stabbing color scheme for their itch.io page, no one is going to want the game that badly. Frankly, I don’t think you could pay me $3000 to download that game.
Now if someone who was making a game that people actually wanted did this, it might actually be incredibly effective. Especially if it was a title people were willing to pay a stupid amount of money for.
He’s definitely doing the right thing. Not because anyone will pay thousands of dollars for the game. Because what he is doing is getting people’s attention. It got your attention. It’s getting other people’s attention on Steam. Won’t be long probably and one of the game websites or YouTubers will cover it.
I like this comment on the Steam page: magicdweedo is one of the few truly independent developers. His cult hits Mealmate and SPACE_HORB are game experiences that I will treasure for the rest of my life. Perhaps Steam doesn’t deserve this kind of weirdness, but for every twenty two whiny haters there will be one special person who understands.
And actually I kind of agree with that. To me this (what he is doing) is what it means to be Indie. Doing your own thing. I have no idea if his games are fun to play but they certainly look very different than the normal Indie stuff that often looks like people are trying too hard to make their games look like everyone else’s or be viewed as “professional” or something. This guy seems to not give a damn and is just making what he wants to make the way he wants to make it.
Doesn’t seem much different from the “spam your Facebook friends for in-game trinkets” approach of many pay-to-plays.
How is the gimmick working? In the sense that @GarBenjamin posted (attention) or actual sales? I can’t imagine anyone would pay $3K+ for that (I don’t see any sales indications).
Price too high > no one plays > no one tweets > price stays high
The only way this could work is with massive marketing (or tweet bots, although that would defeat the purpose).
That’s a really strange idea 
. But to be honest (and technical) I could just built a bot program that keeps tweeting about the game and making it cheaper (and helping the world :p). Now I haven’t really ever used twitter so I don’t know if they have captchas or anything like that, but still there are a lot of ways you can do to tweet it in such huge numbers that It won’t take a single day to make the game free…
If someone did something like that that would be terrible for the developer though. So ultimately I don’t really thing it’s a serious-money maker / TheBigThing like concept but just a joke/test performed by someone with a crappy game (that no one would like to buy (Sorry developer if you are reading this :P)).