It Pays To Follow Trends: iPhone Dev Makes $37,000 In One Day

In the world of game development, everyone wants to make it to the top or at least sell their game and feel a mild bit of success. Developers jump into this industry to express their passion for games and not always to make a million dollars. However, one developer is on the road to a million bucks.

ishootEthan Nicholas, developer of a tank artillery game called iShoot, told Wired.com he quit his job the day his app rose to No. 1 in the App Store, earning him $37,000 in a single day. (wired.com)

Now here is a career choice made for you! He goes on to say that he’d be a millionaire right now if it wasn’t for taxes. We’d also remind him to check out Apple’s cut of the profits too, that might be slowing him down. However, if it wasn’t foir the little iPhone he’d still be working his day job. He’s expecting to hit a million by the end of the year, not too shabby for an iphone shooter game, eh?

He created a ‘lite’ version of the game, much like other developers have, but iShoot Lite shot itself to #1 on the apps charts and his little marketing message “buy the full game for $3.00” was the key he needed. Once people got a taste of the free application they went back for more and now he’s going to be thanking himself for the marketing position he put himself in.

It’s been a few years since a single developer has been able to find gold so quickly, but he did work hard to get to this point. Hustling at night with his one-year old and a dream, he is a self-taught iphone developer who spent hours on the computer desiging the title. Granted, thousands of developers have tried the same move for PC gaming and other such mediums, Ethan Nicholas has proven there is great potential in the iphone along with a few other developers who have found success in the hand-held sector of casual gaming.

Congrats, hope you make it to a million and beyond!

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Imagine a life without a cable box or Tivo and you’re probably envisioning Sony’s road map for a media distribution empire. First, remove Tivo from the situation with a DVR style box using their PlayTV technologies, wired up to the PlayStation 3 using a USB connection. The United States hasn’t seen a launch of PlayTV, more than likely because the PS3 isn’t a huge console here yet and Tivo is partnered with many cable and satellite providers already.

Senior director of the PlayStation Network, Susan Panico said Sony “looks aspirationally at HBO, the way they have Sex and the City and other shows” (gamespot) after admitting Sony wants to replace cable boxes in the home. Tivo has already done a great job removing the need for a cable box, allowing you to rent a “cable card” to insert into a Tivo and gain access to all their content for your DVR needs. DirectTV offers (or has in the past) a Tivo or Tivo-like DVR solution. Cable and DirectTV offer the ability to rent their DVR or offer a solution to purchase your own at a retail outlet What if Sony decides to partner with one or more of these providers to offer an all-in-one solution. PS3 owners wouldn’t have to purchase additional equipment and could be up and running immediately with hard disks big enough to handle HD content.

Sony could offer you a graphically appealing gaming experience, a high definition BluRay solution, media distribution for renting movies, an iTunes style online store for purchasing and playing music all wrapped up in a DVR solution. All this content for a $400 price tag is a value when all the offers are combined into one tiny black box.

Looking at today’s Tivo Series3 HD DVR you’ll notice the ability to play music directly from iTunes, browse and play Youtube shows, watch Disney offerings and even high definition NetFlix playback. The Tivo DVR’s can also talk with other DVR’s in the household making it easy to share TV records across systems. The only thing missing in the Tivo solution is a high definition gaming platform and the BluRay hardware.

We’re all sitting here poking fun at the small PS3 game library and telling people that BluRay is going to lose out to HD downloads yet we may be missing the bigger picture: an all-in-one media empire solution. The PS3 may not carry the largest game library compared to the Xbox 360 or the sales records of the Wii but if Sony finds a way to become a reliable and required media set top box they may realize their true “10 year plan.”

Microsoft To Indulge on Hype at E3 2009Microsoft To Indulge on Hype at E3 2009

This year’s E3 should be interesting as we head back to the no holds barred approach to gaming conferences. While E3 tried to go all PG for the last few years, it’s time to get back to the serious business of hype-o-rama. Microsoft’s on board with it and plans to “break the bank” in terms of hypesville.

Microsoft Game Studio’s producer Phil Spencer said:

“[It’s] very exciting, because there’s a lot of stuff on the docket and maybe we’ll break the bank a little bit and talk about things that are further out, which will hopefully get the community excited.”

Microsoft continues to hammer home big announcements at the E3 events even while in the ho-hum lull of the past few E3 events. Last year they nailed Sony with the Final Fantasy XIII announcement and hyped up the New Xbox Experience. What are they going to pull out this year now that we’ve seen Gears of War 2 and have a pulse on some of their Halo ideas?

They’re talking about hyping games further down the pipeline, perhaps to keep people jazzed about what the future holds even in these economic down times. It’s important to keep gamers focused on what is to arrive on the 360 so they don’t sway towards the opposing consoles in moments of doubt.

Of course, this begs the question, will Sony pull out even more hype? Will Nintendo continue to give mediocre showings with “I told you so” sprinkled in their message? Only time will tell.

(Thanks, Eurogamer)

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Gamers are passionate about gaming, love their games, follow the industry all while living and breathing all things game. This is the green pastures upon which fanboys are born. As we’ve seen at gamingpodcast.net, where we were hit hard by fanboy rage a few days ago the blood boils with hate and rage.

Although our site only received 30+ comments, other sites whom picked up the article have 100+ comments on the article about Blu-ray and my opinions of it. PS3 fanboys ran wild telling me how my name has been “dragged through the mud” followed (and preceded) by many curse words and name calling, many of which I simply refused to post because of the vulgar content.

They have moved on to larger more popular platforms to voice their opinion, by dinging Gears of War 2 prior to the games release on metacritic.com dolling out a 3.5 user submitted review (which has since gone up upon the release). Why did they target GoW2? Because the 360 fanboys nailed LittleBigPlanet with crappy reviews, says smashpad.com.

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Who’s next? Amazon.com allows reviews as well and, as we saw from Spore, it can get pretty dirty there too. Now that Metacritic is altering their review process will gamers wait until they’re allowed to spam with bad reviews to do so, or will they hunt for new social networking proving grounds to give games a bad name?

Perhaps they’ll compete for google keywords to rank #1 for a fraud review of a title to beat out other sites or they’ll find another popular user-generated review site to scar the name of a to-be released title.

There is a gang war on the Net and it involves fanboys finding social media outlets to spread their hate and deception on the opposing consoles. For us, we’ll stick with gaming and leave the rage to someone else.