Wow, wow, and wow! Apple just announced their four prestigious apps of the year — and they’ve selected Osmos as iPad game of the year, 2010! What more can we say but… THANK YOU ALL!

Hey everyone! We’ve submitted a sweet Osmos iOS update (1.6.4) which should be available any day now. By popular demand, it contains:

• Game Center support!
• Skip a Level: Players will be able to skip up to three levels in Odyssey mode. If you’ve been having trouble with a specific level but want to continue the Odyssey (thereby unlocking additional Arcade modes), this update will be a big help!
• Smaller download size on iPhone, allowing it to be downloaded over 3G.

A note for iOS developers out there: we learned a useful lesson we thought we should share. Our last iPhone update (1.6.3) added Retina support, including a set of larger textures that pushed the .ipa file we submitted to Apple up to 19.3 MB. We thought this would squeak by under the 20 MB limit imposed on 3G downloads; but along the way, 1.4 MB was somehow added to the version finally available on the App Store. We’re not sure what in Apple’s process causes this, but we’ve submitted an 18 MB .ipa file this time to try to remain under the limit. Beware the bloat!

Cheers!

Thank you Osmos fans. The 66% off sale returned Osmos for iPhone to the top 10 list. And of course, we’d like to keep it there!

Pricing on the App Store is a regularly debated topic. Many people say to us “If you can charge 1/3 the price and sell ten times the copies, why wouldn’t you?” And our answer is typically “It doesn’t usually work like that.” True, the 99 cent apps dominate the top lists, and those apps are doing great — but for apps that aren’t on the charts, the 99 cent pricing model is unsustainable. So we said to ourselves: if keeping the price at 99 cents can keep Osmos on the charts, it sure would be nice to do it! But how can we know in advance…?

The answer: we don’t have to. Here’s what we’re going to do:

• Osmos will remain at 66% off (99 cents in North America) as long as it remains in the top 25 Apps. For simplicity, we’ll use the US store as our barometer, as it’s by far the largest.
• In parallel, we’re reducing the price of Osmos for iPad by 60% ($1.99 in North America) for the week starting Thursday October 7th, in the hopes that it too will return to the top 25 list. If it does, we’ll continue that sale indefinitely too.

We’d be happy to keep these sales going forever of course, as we’re really proud of Osmos, and are delighted to put the game into as many hands as possible. Fingers crossed!

Thanks,
The Hemi Team

Happy autumn fellow Osmos fans!

It’s 2010, and in my home town a dollar buys you

• 8 minutes of a movie
• 3/4 of a candy bar
• 1 hour of your monthly apartment rent
• 1/3 of a cappuccino

And now…

• Hours of blissful Osmos for iPhone entertainment

Yes, this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Osmos for iPhone is on sale for a dollar (66% off). Click the link now, for on October 8th, Osmos for iPhone will once again cost the same as a cappuccino.

Osmos will be appearing at Nuit Blanche in Toronto this coming Saturday, as part of the Hand Eye Society’s ‘Arcadian Renaissance’ installation at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Swing on by any time from sunset to sunrise and check out six great Toronto indie games on old-school arcade cabinets. Retro-licous! Visit the Nuit Blanche website for details.

Remember the Indie Love Bundle, where we banded together with five other independent developers to create an award-winning games bundle? Well, it’s baaaack and on sale again! And this time it brought along a kid brother, a brand new bundle called the Indie ‘Summer of Love’. What better way to head into fall than to curl up and stay warm playing six more fabulous indie games bundled together for $20. Here’s the trailer:

What’s more, if you missed out on the Indie Love Bundle the first time around, you can get both bundles together in the Indie MEGA Bundle — that’s $155 of games for $30! But act fast: the deal ends Wednesday at midnight! Visit theindiebundle.com for details. Love, The Hemi team and friends

When Apple first announced the iPad, including information on its App Store and Universal Apps, we began asking ourselves should we go “Universal”, or release two separate builds? This is a question that every iOS developer is faced with, and there are those on both sides of the fence, each with their own reasons. It also depends on the nature of the App itself. In the end, we decided to release two separate Apps: “Osmos for iPad” followed by “Osmos”, an iPhone only app. Some of our players have asked “Why?”

Strangely enough, the number one reason was download size. The maximum application size that can be downloaded over 3G is 20MB, otherwise it must be downloaded over wi-fi, so we wanted to make sure our builds were under 20MB. But the bottleneck for Osmos (and many apps) is image assets; we deliver high-res images on the iPad, and lower-res images on the iPhone, and there simply isn’t enough room for both sets. We didn’t want to skimp on iPad resolution, nor did we want to slow things down on older iPhones (loading time in particular). Hence the split.

At this point the savvy reader may say “wait! Osmos supports the iPhone’s Retina Display, which is almost the same resolution as the iPad. What’s up with that?” Well, it’s true, the iPhone build does ship both sets of images, but only part of the higher-res set, as there isn’t enough room for all of it. We cut the high-res textures that rarely appear very large on screen (roughly a third of them); and while this gives fine results on the iPhone, we didn’t want to make this compromise on the iPad, as pixel-density and screen-size are not the same thing.

Our second reason is the App Store market. Hemisphere Games is not a huge studio with the power to define platforms and markets — we do our best to develop great games, and go with the flow on the distribution side of things. Developers releasing a Universal App are faced with a difficult balance between the two stores: iPhone App prices are generally way lower than on the iPad. Take Angry Birds, the pinnacle of success in iOS games: $4.99 on the iPad, 99 cents on the iPhone. There are many examples of this. Pricing a solid game at $4.99, while reasonable on many platforms, is suicide on the iPhone; while pricing a game at 99 cents on the iPad would seriously cut into a developer’s revenue (and further deflate the iPad market). Some games have taken a middle ground, like Canabalt and Solipskier, with Universal Apps at $2.99. But given the download size issue – along with the strong trend on the App Store – we felt it made more sense for us to ship two Apps.

All that said, we feel Osmos is very fairly priced on iOS. We seriously considered pricing the iPad version at $9.99, similar to the PC version (there are many developers that have done this), but we decided to err on the low side, especially given the Universal issue. In the end both versions together are still cheaper than on PC. Yes, the iPhone is a “unique” market, and many feel they have to price at 99 cents or perish. We felt it was important to resist this however. And to quote Adam Saltsman in his Gamasutra article on The 0.99 Problem

We feel that the game is worth $2.99, and our intuition was solid there. Nearly every review (and there have been a lot) has glossed over or outright praised our pricing decision.

Ah, the psychology of the App Store. I’m not even sure if The Oatmeal is being ironic in their recent comic on the subject.

In any case, while it’s tempting to lament the iPhone market along with our fellow independent developers, we buy and play games too, and know what it’s like to be a customer. One of our principles as a developer is to do our best to make sure our players are happy with their purchase, both in terms of game quality as well as price. I feel we’re doing that.