“Eerie Estate Agent” is now “For Rent: Haunted House” and it’s free on iOS

Today, we released a new version of Eerie Estate Agent that renames the game For Rent: Haunted House, and makes it free to play on iOS.

For Rent: Haunted House is a hilarious interactive novel by Gavin Inglis, in which it’s your job to rent out a haunted house before your tyrannical boss has you fired. On iOS, you can play the whole game from beginning to end for free; the game is supported by advertisements. We also offer a one-time in-app purchase to disable the ads.

Anyone who purchased Eerie Estate Agent for iOS can continue to play the game without advertisements; just tap on the “Restore Purchases” link next to the “Buy It” button.

On the web and Android, we can’t offer For Rent: Haunted House for free. On the web, we don’t have any advertisements, and haven’t had any since Google banned us from their AdSense program in 2010. On Android, we have no way to “Restore Purchases” for players who purchased Eerie Estate Agent; if we converted the Android version to a free version, our existing customers would have to pay again to disable advertisements, which isn’t fair to them. We offer the first three chapters of the game on the web for free, and we charge for the rest of the game past that point.

Over time, we will continue to experiment with ways to offer our games at low prices and even for free, without chiseling our loyal customers.

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Is For Rent: Haunted House any different from EEA aside from the title?

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No. It’s not. …

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I personally like the old title better, actually.

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The main goal was to get the word “Haunted” into the title, to make it clearer what the game was about. We’d also considered “Haunted Estate Agent.”

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It’s a pity there’s no way to release the game free on the Android. iOS gets all of the cool stuff.

I liked the title Eerie Estate Agent too. Neighbourhood Necromancer and Eerie Estate Agent are two of my favourite game titles (titles not favourite games admittedly). That said being an Estate Agent, even an Eerie one sounds rather dull so I think For Rent: Haunted House does at least make enough of a difference. I hope the rebranding works out.

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Haunted House gets more searches than Eerie Estate :slight_smile:

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That’s great, I just got it on my phone. Just wondering, but how does that all work with making it free and having the adds? I mean for what reason and how does anyone else do that?

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@dfabulich what is the reason for a game made free and supported by advertisements? does anyone have this option?

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If you’d like to publish a Hosted Game for free with ads, that is an option for you, with a few caveats.

  1. We don’t have ads on our web site.
  2. There is no way to convert from free to paid; we can only convert from paid to free on iOS.
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@dfabulich alright thanks. So how does the process work?

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For Hosted Games, you write a finished game (we recommend having people test it as a Work in Progress as you go) and then you send us your game. We’ll also ask you to provide some “cover art.” Then we’ll make it go live.

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@dfabulich so the writer of the game gets to decide if they want the game to be free/with adds or only paid for on the app store?

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They can offer their opinion. Final determination is up to us.

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… but we almost always agree with the author.

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@dfabulich is there a preference?

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IMO, shorter games tend to work better as free games.

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