Perplex City - Mind Candy

Mind Candy

Perplex City is notable within the ARG field for charting new water with a unique business model. Typically, ARGs tend to either be exercises in viral marketing for new products, or grassroots projects developed by amateur groups. (One exception was Majestic, a subscription-based ARG run by Electronic Arts, which had a poor commercial reception.) Perplex City aims to become a truly self-supporting venture by selling the collectible puzzle cards that tie into the "alternate reality" aspects of the game.

This initially attracted a degree of controversy from players accustomed to playing ARGs for free. However, Mind Candy has assured the player base that purchase of the cards is not required to play the game, nor collect the reward. The cards and the ARG are related loosely enough to enable anyone to follow the game free-of-charge if they so wish, and the concept has since been embraced by many.

In other words, from a commercial standpoint, buying the cards is encouraged; However the game is built using enough online story elements and engaging character interaction as to make buying the cards optional to playing the game. Where some players might choose to only buy the cards, some other players might opt to only follow the story online and buy no cards. By majority, most players seem to buy roughly 20 or 30 cards and engage in occasionally reading the web elements.

The cards were first released in select outlets arounds the world, but are increasingly readily available from retailers both on- and offline. On September 7, 2006, Mind Candy announced that GameStop was to begin carrying Perplex City cards in 700 stores in the United States. As of September 26, 2006, some 682,425 cards have been marked as solved on the Perplex City leaderboard, with 45,215 players registered.

Mind Candy received a round of venture capital worth $3 million from Index Ventures, an investor in Skype and other technology companies.

In June 2007 Mind Candy announced that it would be putting season 2 of its ARG on hold indefinitely.