Remember Adam’s time with Afterfall: Insanity? Well, you can see for yourself if he was right to struggle to get along with its peculiar ways. How? By what means is such a thing possible, you ask, leaning over your spectacles in utter astonishment. By the means of a demo!

A demo I say!

This is of course the game you can pre-order for a single dollar, in a very strange experiment. Strange, what with their belief that they will only start taking their cut of this pile of single dollars once it reaches ten million high. 10,000,000 pre-orders. You know – massively more than most AAA games get. You know – a million more pre-orders than the most pre-ordered game of all time, Modern Warfare 3 got. They’ve had 18,460 so far. It’s out in ten days. And it’s an experiment that is a little confusing when you look at the small print. Which reveals that you won’t actually get the game for a dollar.

I honestly can’t tell what their plan was. If they meet the obviously impossible target of 10,000,000 pre-orders, then the game will officially cost $1, and they’ll give 10% of their fortune to charity. If it doesn’t, which it obviously won’t, then they’ll give 100% of the dollars they’ve received to charity, and then charge $33.90 for it. So, not honouring the pre-order price, but rather taking your dollar, giving it to a charity, and then asking you for another 30 bucks to play the game. Erm. It’s a “bet”, they explain in the accompanying video:



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So what’s going to happen is they’re going to get the kudos of giving a couple of grand to charity, and you’re going to have to pay full price for the game. I’m all in favour of supporting innovative ideas for sales, especially with indies, but this time I think they’ve got it wrong.

(Oh, and it’s not a dollar, either. It’s $1.11, because of some extremely spurious “key generating” fee.)

Well, I guess people throw their one pounds down the National Lottery drain every week, so it’s not that far-fetched. But unless Afterfall manages to garner 9981540 pre-orders in the next ten days, you may as well give your own dollar to the charity of your choice. But still, now you can check out the demo (alt link) to see if you think your dollar is worth the gamble.