Alto's Adventure Now Available for the Mac

Endless runner Alto's Adventure is now available for the Mac. This comes nearly three and a half years after the game's initial release on iOS in 2015. It graced Android and Windows a year later and is now present on the Mac App Store. The game has you in the role of the titular Alto as you snowboard your way across procedurally-generated landscapes featuring one-button gameplay. It was followed by a sequel called Alto's Odyssey that was released this year.  Alto's Adventure on the Mac is priced at $10 in the US and Rs. 799 in India. On iOS the game costs Rs. 399 in India and $4.99 in the US while the Android version is free-to-play for a host of reasons.

"We thought long and hard with Noodlecake [the game's Android publisher] about how we could best monetise the game - to launch as a premium title (like on iOS), or to explore other alternatives that stayed true to our core values and vision for the game," Snowman's Ryan Cash said.

The other is piracy. "Piracy on Android is a much bigger issue on the platform especially in the case of premium iOS titles that charge more than $0.99," Ryan Holowaty of Noodlecake, the company behind the port, told The Verge.

Cash cited the case of Monument Valley, whose developer Ustwo Games produced an infographic that detailed only 5 percent of the game's install base had bothered to pay for the game.

And then there was Android's international reach to consider. "Android has a much larger install base than iOS internationally, and games that release in countries like China and Japan are basically free-to-play only at this point. So to really capitalise on the market internationally, it made sense to have a free version," Holowaty added.

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