Since the advent of the whole race to the bottom pricing of the App Store, budgets for mobile development (particularly on the indie side of things) are super tight. Because of this (and the fact that we can just get everything we need to cover a game from an email) we almost never see the swag that people covering PC/console games are used to. On our side of the fence, having someone just send you a t-shirt is incredibly rare. I’m more than OK with this, since I have enough t-shirts to go at least a month without wearing the same shirt twice, maybe two.
Anyway, with swag as rare as African rhinos, what’s even more rare is getting swag that makes people go, “Oh wow, that’s really cool." The guys behind Surfy sent me what amounts to a next-generation greeting card. Surely everyone by now has seen greeting cards that play music or have sound effects? Well, how about play video? I thought maybe I was just a simpleton by being so impressed with this visit to the terrifying future of greeting cards, but, all the friends I showed it to this weekend were similarly amazed.
Here it is:
The colors of the screen are a little crazy in the video because its viewing angle is pretty narrow, but, regardless, that’s pretty rad, right? It’s even got a USB port on it that lets you charge the card and presumably change out the video that gets autoplayed. It’s got about ~90MB of onboard storage, but I didn’t really want to mess with it.
Surfy is launching this Thursday, and while I’ve got no idea if the game is going to be good, I’m excited and terrified with the potential of next generation greeting cards… But, hey, it sure is a cool way to promote your iOS game.
