To clarify, this is $400k a month just from ad revenues. http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/Fruit+Ninja/news.asp?c=43061 DP
Fruit Ninja is a top selling and top downloaded title across multiple platforms. Being in the top 10 paid downloads in the US App Store alone is enough to get you US$100k or more a month.
No. Smashing success makes most of that cash. If you can get a game to the top, figuring out how to monetize it is the easy part. The hard part is making your game a household name.
You have to be pretty inept to not make tons of money when you've got millions upon millions of daily active users. Just so happens, the people who are in charge of this sort of stuff at Halfbrick are super smart, so they're extracting a ton of money even from their free users.
When our game, Flick Kick Field Goal, was in the top 10 paid chart in the US in November, the free version, Flick Kick Field Goal Kickoff, which doesn't have as much content and wasn't even in the top 20 free chart was making twice as much per day.
I've even made a good bit of money off my one iPhone game to warrent reinvesting. Just bought the Unity 4 license not too long ago as well as a new macbook (i programmed BB1 on a tiny, old macbook that I bought used). You'd be surprised how well you can do if you make a decent product and get the word out. I never topped any charts btw.
Absolutely! People understandably get drawn into these epic sales figures for the usual suspects and most other devs then complain that if you're not in the top 10/25/100 you can't make money. We've been out of the top 200 all games chart for many months with our main game and it's still dribbling in enough cash to keep the lights on. I guess it depends more on your own expectations than anything else. We'd all love speedboats and ferraris but back in the real world I'm happy if my mortgage gets paid and I can go to Spain once a year.
Well, Maybe instead of trying to go myself then why not helm me and share the cash? I have a game as big as Draw IT