The best case scenario for a game you developed for the iPhone, and sold for 0.99$?

4,000,000$, that’s right. Doodle jump has purportedly made that much money. This is obviously not surprising for the game itself, but it’s pretty shocking none-the-less. DJ has been on the top charts for maybe almost a year now. I’ve read articles about the top-players making ~50,000$ a day in profits. But four million. Wow.

You’d be crazy to think you could duplicate this. In fact, it looks like Lima Sky hasn’t. But Doodle Jump is a really amazing game for a lot of reasons. I think it’s the same deal for cartoons as it is for video games. Character.

Character makes every Pixar film great. Character makes every classic Disney film and Warner Brothers cartoon great. The Doodle Jumper has character and lots of it. Igor even says that “People seem to project a lot of interesting things on him”. Since it’s an interactive game, people actually develop a real relationship with Doodle Jumper. Or at least a relationship that’s real enough for this day and age.

He’s the carpet-covered monkey-surrogate. The soft, plushy covering over top a mechanical interface. LS has been pretty good at re-using Doodle Jumper. He apparently appears in other games by them and some other “partners” of sort. He’ appears in some games without much explanation. I imagine it’s a good revenue stream to license your character out, maybe an under-the-table one.

But what’s confusing is that there is no Doodle Jump 2, or some other game which has the same characters that people are used to. LS has some other games in the store, and it looks like they might be popular. But if they could come up with some smashing new game for you to control Doodle Jumper in, it would be pretty huge. 

I think the brass-ring for an iPhone app of any kind, if you don’t already have a licensed brand (Scrabble, Prince of Persia, a law school) is to make a game that has a singular character. Put the character out there and give him a swaggering personality. 

Aside: I wish I remembered the persons name. But I found out that the person who did the art for Doodle Jump was a Montrealer! They didn’t even know how huge the game was since they didn’t have an iPhone. Apparently they sold the artwork for a couple hundred dollars. Unfortunately I didn’t write down the person’s website name.