Apple’s App Store can indeed be a strange place to do business. Even though the store has become a behemoth with over 20,000 apps available and 500 million apps downloaded, the success stories are few and far between when compared to how many developers are grinding away.
The latest comes from an iPhone developer named Ethan Nicholas. A while back news broke that Nicholas’ application, iShoot (iTunes link), was becoming far too lucrative to go unnoticed.
Coupled with the release of a “lite” version of iShoot, and the lucky benefits of hitting the Top Paid App spot in iTunes, Nicholas experienced just how much of a lottery the app store can truly be. The lite version went live on January 3rd, 2009, and less than ten days later, the full version of iShoot skyrocketed into the number one spot on iTunes with nearly 17,000 downloads. In other words, Nicholas was netting around $21,000 a day for the $2.99 application after Apple’s 30% slice was taken out. At the time Nicholas was working at Sun Microsystems, and had developed iShoot in his spare time, although he was planning on quitting. “I’m still in shock,” Nicholas said, “I’ve given my two week notice at Sun Microsystems. I’m gonna do this full time now.”
Ray over at the iPhone Savior helpfully got in touch with Nicholas to check in and see how he was doing, both with the application and reeling from the success he’s recently been blessed with.
I contacted Ethan to track his progress since quitting his full time employment with Sun Microsystems after iShoot reached number one. To date, his tank artillery game has sold 320,000 units, netting Nicholas well over 600K dollars, while his free version of iShoot Lite has been downloaded in excess of 2.4 million times since it went live on January 3rd. Of that number about 13% decided to pay $2.99 for the iShoot app, averaging $23,000 a day in profit after Apple takes their 30% cut. An impressive pull with the App Store hosting over 20K titles to date.
Nicholas goes on to explain that he hasn’t changed his life much since this all happened. “I haven’t changed my lifestyle at all. I’m living as modestly as I was before iShoot took off,” Nicholas told iPhone Savior by phone. “My car is a 15 year old piece of crap with 140K miles on it and I’m gonna drive it until it falls apart.”
When asked if he was working on any new games, Nicholas was nice enough to share that his upcoming titles would be mostly 3D and were “already fairly well mapped out.” Additionally, he explains that iShoot version 2.0 should be released in a few weeks. “My goal with my new games is to reach number one by creating incredibly awesome games. I’m not going to produce shovelware,” Ethan said.
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3 Comments to “iPhone Developer Makes $600,000 From Clever Artillery iPhone Game”
With even seasoned developers making solid apps having difficulty getting noticed in the App Store, right now it amounts to hitting a lottery number for success stories like this. I wouldn’t spend all the money buying more lottery tickets…
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@Dave: Even worse is that a mass amount of developers are targeting a so-called iPhone target demographic with fart apps and flashlight apps. The games department is doing pretty well and the addition of more powerful processors should give that a big boost. TouchArcade.com has been doing a good job of acting as a filer between the garbage and games worth checking out.
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It good that we have so many different apps and developers. This pushes developers to keep making the great content!
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