One solo developer's 'ugly little game' managed to earn him a significant amount of money when it became an instant hit, selling over 50,000 copies on the App Store in its first month of release.
Sometimes all you need as a independent game developer is a simple yet effective concept and word of mouth, as that can catapult you into stardom and riches as news about your project spreads.
Everything from Flappy Bird to Among Us serves as the perfect example of this, as small teams – often comprising one or a handful of developers – work together to create something that thousands, if not millions, can enjoy.
Despite releasing what some called an 'ugly little game', one developer managed to achieve almost overnight success in the early years of the indie game revolution, picking up a staggering wad of cash for his efforts.
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What was the game in question?
As reported by WIRED, Luca Redwood – known under his development name 'EightyEightGames' – released 10000000 (pronounced ten million) on the iOS App Store in August 2012.
It's a relatively simple game, blending rougelite and dungeon crawling genres with the color-matching of something like Bejewled, and it doesn't exactly look like many of the blockbuster AAA titles that typically dominate the sales charts.
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It's end goal requires players to reach 10,000,000 points – as the name suggests – which they can do by working their way through the dungeon and defeating monsters. Dying during the run will reset your counter, prompting you to start all over again in an effort to reach the lofty goal.
While it received good reviews overall, its sales significantly outperformed Redwood's dreams, and it became a smash hit against all expectations in the game's first month.
How much did Redwood make from 10000000?
Shortly after release and the publication of favorable reviews, 10000000 was selling around 2,000 copies per day, which eventually amounted to around 50,000 sales by the end of the game's first month.
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Developed entirely in his free time across the course of a year, Redwood set the price of the game at just $2, making it incredibly easy for people to pick it up and give it a try — and pick it up they did!
By March 2014 – which was just under two years after the game's initial iOS release and over a year following ports on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android – Redwood revealed at the Game Developers Conference that 10000000 had sold 330,000 units in total, netting him around $500,000 in sales following App Store deductions.
While this doesn't quite compare to the billions that Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson earned from his own project, it still marks a significant victory in the indie games space that showed the shifting desires of audiences to smaller games on unconventional platforms.