How much money did flappy bird maker make
Airplanes can't fly because it's too hot? All you need is bucks and a free afternoon. For some reason, a surprising number of these apps, like Flying Cyrus , Cyrus Flyer and Jumping Miley , feature the disembodied head of pop star Miley Cyrus.
Indie smash hit 'Flappy Bird' racks up $50K per day in ad revenue - The Verge
One of the most downloaded of this unlikely sub-genre is Flappy Miley Wrecking Ball Pro , created by Gregory Storm. He uploaded the game on February 12, just two days after Flappy Bird flew the coop. So how was he able to create Flappy Miley so quickly? He bought everything he needed.
The first step was purchasing the source code to Flappy Crocodile. This is hardly a new idea in the videogame business, but just as the democratization of development has allowed people to create games with small budgets and sell them at low prices, so too has it created a market where middleware mavens can sell source code to would-be developers for next to nothing.
You need an app for your restaurant? Want to create a match-three game like Bejeweled? A clone of Tiny Wings? The rights to the source code are just a few clicks and a few bucks away.
In the case of Flappy Crocodile , that guy is Vojtech Svarc, a year-old app developer from the Czech Republic. Svarc got into the app business about a year ago, but quickly realized that investing large amounts of cash into a single app and hoping it would be discovered among the 1 million or so already on the App Store might not be the best use of his time.
Then he thought, what if building an app could be more like building a website? Svarc watched the App Store and noticed that any time an app made waves, similar apps would be buoyed to the top.
Speed, he thought, was key to taking advantage of that. App templates would allow developers to build trendy apps in no time. Svarc says Tiny Flying Drizzy , which was the No. Anyone with a C-note and ten seconds can license the source code to a videogame. But what do you do then?
To prove it, I bought a license to use Flappy Crocodile. It also included a voucher for an online course, led by Svarc and app developer Yohann Taieb, that walks you through the process of creating your first app. It covers everything from registering for an Apple developer license to reskinning the graphics and adding in-game advertising to uploading your finished product.
Then I found the folder containing the files for animating the crocodile. I opened up Photo Booth and snapped a selfie, cut out my head using Photoshop, then replaced the crocodile sprite with my face. I compiled the new code, feeling more than a little surprised when the iPhone simulator launched successfully, allowing me to direct my own head through a gauntlet of pipes. He made several other tweaks before submitting the game to the App Store, all of them minor: The static background image is different, and all the sound effects have been changed.
Otherwise, everything from the menus to the pipes are straight from the source code. And anyone can buy complex elements of game design like artificially intelligent enemies. The widespread availability of source code and templates is just putting small developers on par with big players in the app market, says Storm. Big Fish Games, he notes, has published more than hidden object games on the App Store.
Creating such games, he says, is like appearing on the cooking competition show Chopped. With all of his costs — buying the art, hiring a freelance programmer to help with updates, etc. If it sticks around — say, if Miley Cyrus twerks her way back into the news — Storm could rake it in.
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The rights to the source code are just a few clicks away.
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