Untold fortunes await

This is the kind of article I don't need to read. It puts crazy thoughts in my head. The article relates the stunning success of a young fellow who developed an iPhone game over the course of four months, put it on the App Store, and made $250,000 in the first two months. Now he's quit is day job, started a company and employs several people. He's living the dream.

The article does point out (a little slowly) that untold fortunes aren't exactly guaranteed. I don't have any serious notions about creating an overnight sensation--though it would be pretty cool. In fact, being the realist that I am, I can think of three big reasons why my path probably won't match his:

• He designed a puzzle game. Puzzle games have very broad appeal and are great to play for five minutes at a time.
• He made a game that required minimal art assets (just a few triangles that can flip over). This fact alone probably saved him months of development time.
• His game was available at the launch of the App Store. This is the big one. The number of games available on the App Store has grown ridiculously fast over the last few months. The difficulty of cutting through the clutter increases with every game that gets added.

I'm not trying to say that puzzle games are easy to make. It's a space that will get crowded really fast, and few have the right addictive qualities. I'm also not that interested in making them. For some reason that will probably doom my game development career before it begins, want to make games that have some element of character and space to them.

The real point probably is that, while there's real money to be made in iPhone gaming, it's going to get harder all the time to get people's attention. But with a great idea and a lot of polish, it just might be possible to create something really special. Success might also take quite a few failures.