Tack Mobile launched its first game Adrift free after a founder quit his job

In March 2013 the founder posting as seanalltogether told Hacker News he had quit his job six months earlier to pursue indie development, and here was his team's first game: Adrift, an iOS puzzle game about drawing paths to connect matching tiles, published by a small studio shipping under the name Tack. He said it had taken about three years of reading HN to convince himself to make the jump with his friends.

The game was written in cocos2d, and the founder had prototyped the core mechanic in HTML5; because the level builder was HTML-based, the team added a 10-level playable demo to the website at almost no extra cost. The app was free to download, and the demo funneled players straight to the App Store — several commenters said trying the demo is what made them download the full game the same day.

Hacker News gave the launch an outsized reception: 858 points and 329 comments on 2013-03-06. The discussion repeatedly told the team to charge — commenters said they would pay for the game — while the founders explained they had gone back and forth on ads and decided that being free out of the gate was their best chance for success, leaving room to A/B test pricing later.

The studio had to ship the app as 'Adrift by Tack' because the plain name was taken on the store, made its own soundtrack, and emailed blogs for press without high expectations. The open question running through the thread — how a free game becomes a business — was exactly the question the launch strategy was designed to defer: build an audience and a name first, and figure out revenue afterward.