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As I’m writing this, the temperature in London is 9.4 degrees Celsius. Also as I’m writing this, the indie puzzle game A Good Snowman is Hard To Build has been out for 10 years. What do those two facts have in common?
To celebrate turning 10, the adorable puzzle game by Draknek & Friends has come up with the most unusual and creative pricing structure I’ve ever seen. Whatever the current temperature in London is (in Celsius), that’s the price of the game (in dollars). The price is updated hourly, so the colder it gets in London, the cheaper the game gets. It’s 9.4 C as I’m writing this, which means you can currently buy the game for $9.40.
That will change, of course. At about 9 pm tonight, the predicted London temperature will be 6 C, so if you wait a few hours you’ll be able to buy A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build for only $6. At 11 pm the thermometer will drop to a frosty 4 C, so it’ll cost $4. At 6 am tomorrow? The temperature is projected to be 1 C. You can do the math.
So, what’s this game, anyway? It’s a puzzle game about a nice little monster who wants to build snowmen. By pushing snowballs around in a series of wintery gardens, you first create the three traditional snowman segments—big, medium, and small—and then stack them up.
It’s a simple concept but it can get pretty tricky as you navigate around the tiny gardens, but you can undo your steps one by one or quickly reset a level to start over. It’s super sweet, too: each snowman has a name, and you can hug each one when you’re done building it.
This clever pricing system is only available on Itch.io, where “every hour, the monster goes out to the weather station in London to check the temperature” and “set the price accordingly.” It is also on sale on Steam until March 7, but that price doesn’t fluctuate.
If the temperature in London drops to zero, yep, the game will be free. (Sorry, you don’t get money back if the price slides into the negatives.) The developer also invites you to switch to Fahrenheit if you really want to (that’d put the game at about $30 at the moment) or even Kelvin ($282.55!) if you’re feeling especially generous.
I think you should buy A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build if you haven’t already. It’s a great puzzle game and, depending on the temperature in London at the moment you’re reading this, it’s on sale for one heck of a great price.
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Kurt Indovina
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