'Give a Gift' of your favorite iPhone app with new iTunes option

JC Fletcher — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 02:00:00 EST

Want to send your favorite iPhone fart app to all your friends? You can do that now! Apple has added an app gifting function to the iTunes store (the one on your computer, not the App Store on your phone). To find it, just click the little arrow next to the price on any app, and choose to "Gift This App." There, you'll be able to specify recipients, write a personal message, and send the certificate either through email or by printing it out.

Sadly, this functionality arrived too late for you to send out copies of the $400 Zits & Giggles -- Apple removed the game following Tommy Refenes's Indie Game Maker Rant.

'Give a Gift' of your favorite iPhone app with new iTunes option originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Super Meat Boy dude: 'App Store is Tiger handheld of this generation'

JC Fletcher — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:40:00 EST

[Castlevania Wiki]

At last night's Indie Game Maker Rant, Tommy Refenes, one half of Team Meat, appropriately let off some steam about Apple's App Store, saying, "The majority of people who do anything for the App Store work on it and then kind of get screwed over." Refenes suggested that what the App Store specializes in are cheap ports of established brands, sold on their established names alone, as he compared it to the Tiger LCD handheld games of the late '80s and early '90s.

"It's just a way to sell a brand," Refenes said. "That's what the Tiger handheld games were, and that's what I think the App Store is."

To prove a point that the App Store is "kind of shit for most things," Refenes recounted the experiment he launched with Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman. The two developed a "joke game" called Zits & Giggles (in which players pop pimples) and submitted it to the App Store at the 99 cents price point. Each time sales dropped off, they raised the price. Consumers kept buying it, however, as the game rose to $15, then to $50, and so on -- it was even purchased for $299!

We don't know what to take away from that, but luckily Refenes had an observation: "My conclusion to all of this is that the people who you're selling to on the App Store are not necessarily gamers." Care to challenge that theory?

Zits & Giggles ($349.99):

Super Meat Boy dude: 'App Store is Tiger handheld of this generation' originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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