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Alto’s Adventure coming to Android on Feb. 11 with a free-to-play model

The beautiful and widely praised Alto’s Adventure is coming to the Play Store with a free-to-pay model on February 11th. The game was first released on iOS nearly a year ago and will also be available in the Amazon App Store.

The side scrolling game has players navigate a snowboarder through a snowy landscape. The game goes on as long as users can avoid obstacles and challenges. Throughout the game, users try to collect as many points as possible and perform various snowboarding tricks that are assigned to them three at a time.

On iOS, the app costs $2.99, but its Android version will be free due to rampant piracy, according to the app’s developers. The game was ported over to Android by Noodlecake Studios, who have previously done the same for other iOS converts. Speaking to The Vergethe decision to adopt a freemium model was informed on a number of factors, one of them being how only 11% of users who played a previous game of theirs bought the app.

Besides piracy, the freemium model was adopted due to the wider trend of people around the world not wanting to pay for apps. Games released in Asian countries, like China and Japan, are “basically free-to-play only at this point.” For users, this translates to an in-app purchase that doubles the number of coins collected and an opt-in video ad. Hopefully, the latter will in no way interfere with the game’s beautiful graphics.

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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com