Semi Secret on Canabalt’s $2.99 price and twittering success

There's a lot of talk at the moment about the pricing of iPhone games, and the value of publishers on the App Store, especially for indie developers.

Well, this weekend Texan studio Semi Secret Software released its retro, one button platformer Canabalt - originally made for Flash - for iPhone, priced $2.99.

And soon twitterfeeds were filling up with its high score updates - "I ran XXXm before hitting a wall and tumbling to my death".

The game also climbed the charts, so far reaching #54 on the US paid chart, #47 in Canada, #37 in the UK, and #30 in Germany.

We sent some questions over to artist Adam Saltsman to get his thoughts about the release.

A friend once said after playing it that, "It's really easy to do something dumb and awesome at the same time. Like leap over an entire building only to land on a bomb and explode."

I think that is a lot of it - you get to do cool stuff right away and the controls don't interfere with that experience.

Ummm, that is a good question. Canabalt's launch was about testing a lot of different things before we launch a slightly bigger, riskier game, so really the baseline for this launch was just whether or not we learned anything about doing independent releases on the App Store.

I am happy to say that we've learned a lot!

I am not sure yet. For the Flash version, Twitter accounted for something like 2-3 percent of the hits on my site, which sounds tiny but it's a great trade for adding a single line of code.

I have no idea what the impact has been on the iPhone version (and our integration there required significantly more than one line of code), but there has been a heck of a lot of tweeting so far.

Haha. This is the big question it seems. I was a little nervous, I'm not sure if Eric [Johnson, Semi Software's co-founder and coder] was or not. We got some very thoughtful and well-meaning advice from a lot of friends before launch that this was a bad idea.

At the end of the day though, Canabalt is an OK game, and $2.99 just seems like an OK price for an OK game, regardless of platform.

No.

We are planning at least one major update to add our proprietary user profile and high scores system (as well as some other things I can't mention yet).

Beyond that, we will just listen to feedback and figure out what makes the most sense.

You can follow Semi Secret Software via web and Twitter.