PreCentral: OddBlob hits the App Catalog, Astraware sets new goal for Word Games

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It took a little bit longer than both we and Astraware apparently expected, but the ever-popular game OddBlob has finally hit the HP TouchPad. For the going rate of $1.99, you'll be able to guide squishy little OddBlob through squishy disintegrating maze levels, much to your amusement, we would hope. The arrival of OddBlob caps off the saga of the TouchPad Totalizer, Astraware's sales tracker for the TouchPad used to publicly gauge and encourage interest in Astraware's games on the TouchPad. The tally topped the 5000 mark last month, hitting the top of the scale and triggering the porting and release of Astraware Casino. With OddBlob out, we can put the Totalizer behind us.

Or can we? Nope!, says Astraware. They've extended the Totalizer up to a new goal of 7500, at which point Astraware will work on getting their Word Games pack onto the TouchPad. We're currently sitting at a total of 6341 sales for Astraware games on the TouchPad, which is both encouraging (not that far to go) and a little bit depressing (only 6341?). Word Games is a five-pack of, well, word games, including Shuffle (find as many words as you can from a jumble of letters), Hexed (trace words on a hexagonal grid), Wordsearch (like the newspaper classic), Gridlock (trace words on a grid, selecting every square), and Spellmaster (you get three options, pick the one that's not misspelled).

As before, we've got to give Astraware props for moving forward with TouchPad development even though the profits reaped from webOS over the four-month history of the Totalizer can't have been huge. Plus there are the easily achievable sales goals they've set - only 2500 sales of five popular games needed to move to the next tier is doable without really trying. If there's one advantage the webOS App Catalog has over the Google Play Market and iOS App Store, it's that the lower number of apps overall and new daily make app discovery easy and keeps new apps near the top of the list for a while. But then again, that's because it's a shrinking platform with a shrinking developer base. Thankfully the users and developers left are generally the dedicated kind. Like Astraware. You guys rock.

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