The first mission in the highly anticipated MacHeist 2 is now underway. I’m a newcomer to MacHeist, as I came across MacHeist 1 just after it had ended. The premise is fairly clever and engaging. There are multiple “missions” that one has to complete which give the “agent” (you) free use of a commercial Mac application. At the end of the event, an application bundle is revealed and then sold at a heavily discounted price. For example, the bundle in MacHeist 1 was valued at a few hundred dollars, but sold for only $49.
The missions are basically like online scavenger hunts, with clues and encoded directions scattered about the internet that eventually lead to a 4 digit number that you punch into a combination lock to reveal your “loot”. The loot is usually one or two Mac applications that you can use free of charge. The catch is that many of the applications will be special builds that might have some functionality missing, or possibly be unable to update to new versions. It’s basically a way of getting the application out in the public with the hope that some users will really enjoy it and pay for a full license, or that when a new version comes out, they will pay for the upgrade.
Despite it’s overwhelming success, there has also been some controversy in the way the profits from MacHeist 1 were distributed. John Gruber, a very well known tech blogger, wrote a couple articles on the subject here and here. It all comes down to the share of the profits that is going to the developers of the applications in the bundle. To summarize John’s research, the MacHeist crew, consisting of 3 people, are getting an estimated 88% of the profits, while the developers are each getting 1.3%, with the remaining profits going to charity. It was setup so that the developers would get a flat fee in return for the rights to sell the application for a specified period of time, regardless of how many bundles were sold. To put this in perspective, the estimated total revenue was $760,000.
MacHeist 2 was also involved in some controversy when it was revealed that MacHeist was behind the fake hacks on a few popular Mac themed blogs. The idea was that a few well known Mac blogs would pretend to be hacked by someone who was targeting Mac “fanboy” sites. The sites would remain down for 24 hours, replaced with a defacement page displaying a picture of a rotting apple and some text about Mac users being too smug. The hoax was going pretty well until the company who provided one of the blogs with hosting and content management software starting fielding inquiries about possible security vulnerabilities in their products. At this point, one of the participating blogs revealed that it was, in fact, a hoax. Many readers of the participating blogs began to express their outrage over being tricked in to thinking the hacks were real.
I think I’ll wait and see how MacHeist 2 plays out before commenting on the controversy, but in the meantime, I definitely recommend checking it out and taking part in the missions. Regardless of the controversy, it’s definitely good fun.
