Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade II, a 3D hack-and-slash quest game for the iPad with bleeding-edge graphics, saw its downloads more than triple and added nearly six million new users to its base after it was temporarily made free as part of Apple’s promotional celebration of the App Store’s fifth anniversary.
The company says it saw 1.7 million new downloads in just the first day of the promotion, during which Apple offered five games and five non-game apps for free, with prices normally set between $1 and $20. Infinity Blade II normally costs $7.
The rare statement of exact sales and download figures came from a Chair publicist during an interview with AllThingsD. It was also noted that downloads of the original Infinity Blade (which was not discounted from its usual $6 price) were also boosted by a ripple effect by a factor of 2.5. The excitement even spread to a $3 e-book novelization called Infinity Blade: Awakening, boosting sales by 70 percent.
