HOW BROWSER-NATIVE
DISTRIBUTION GIVES PREMIUM GAMES A SECOND LIFE
By Andranik Aslanyan, Head of Growth, VIVERSE E
ven a great game can go quiet. Alphaputt – an award-winning 3D mini-golf game built around typography - launched on iOS in 2018.
Apple named it Game of the Day, it earned multiple editorial features, and the design community took notice fast. But over time, discoverability faded. The market had shifted, and a premium indie gem was getting buried under free-to-play titles and subscription bundles. The answer wasn’t a redesign. It was a second
home. The Alphaputt team partnered with VIVERSE to bring the game to the web, free to play on any device with a browser. Alphaputt comes from Sennep Games, the games
division of Sennep Ltd, a London-based design studio with a portfolio spanning mobile games OLO,
OLO Loco, and Alphaputt. Alphaputt has earned a Lovie Award Gold and a D&AD Wood Pencil, among others. It wasn’t a game the team was going to port unless they could do it right.
WHY ALPHAPUTT NEEDED A SECOND HOME Each of Alphaputt's 26 levels is a letter of the alphabet, rendered as a miniature world with its own lighting, textures, and layered soundscape. It’s a polished, crafted experience, and at $3.99 USD on the App Store, players had to commit before they’d ever taken a shot. In a market dominated by free-to-play, that
upfront cost is a barrier. The team was reminded just how much it matters when they ran a free promotion on the App Store. “Normally the game gets a few hundred downloads a month. During that brief window we saw more than 26,000 in just a few days, with over 14,000 in a single day.” But simply making the iOS
version free wasn’t the right answer. Alphaputt was designed as a premium experience and retrofitting free-to- play mechanics would change what the game fundamentally is. As the team put it, “the game has a polished aesthetic and dropping ads into it felt
24 | MCV/DEVELOP September/October 2026
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