iShoot developer rakes in $600,000 from a single app
He iShoots, he iScores
We gave our new geeky hero Ethan Nicholas a salute a few weeks back when his iPhone artillery game iShoot hit the App Store number one spot and he was able to quit his day job to focus on game development.
The money printing programmer has revealed in an interview with Wired that if it wasn’t for taxes, the game would have made him a millionaire by now.
"I'm not going to be a millionaire in the next month, but I'd be shocked if it didn't happen at the end of the year," he said in the interview.
He’s currently around $600,000 in profit from his game, bringing in around $37,000 on a good day from that one app. But it’d be monumentally unfair to peg Nicholas’s success as good luck.
The game did almost no business when released last October, after the programmer put in a second working day - every day - developing the game after his normal day job at Sun Microsystems.
Learning to program for the iPhone as he went along (unable to afford the actual books), Nicholas eventually released a Lite version at the beginning of January in an effort to recoup some of his costs.
This marketing plan is what really helped iShoot catch hold, and within a couple of weeks he was a self-employed iPhone developer.
As jealous as we are, we’ve got to hand it to the man once again (and we hope his bloody solid gold yacht sinks).
