![]() Last year, aged 17, he sold his iPhone app Summly to yahoo for an estimated £18 million. Nick D’Aloisio was just 15 when he came up with an idea to summarise news stories to save readers trawling through lots of text on smartphone screens. With hired help to created the 2D and 3D imagery, Flick Football was a huge success, with almost six million downloads to date. A follow-up, Flick Football Super Save, saw the player become goalie instead. The 59p app’s idea was simple – to score goals by curving the ball David Beckham-style around a wall. With business partner Mark Allen, Oli worked on several ideas for games and began developing the most likely success, Flick Football, with an eye on the upcoming 2010 World Cup. So I thought, let’s leave and give it a go.” If a 59p game got 100,000 downloads, it would make £59,000. He said: “The iPhone catapulted the opportunities to make money from gaming. Oli Christie was working in advertising when the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 changed everything. It has an estimated current value of more than £3billion. Launched in December 2009, the game’s success saved ailing Rovio and saw its staff numbers rise from nine to more than 150. When my mother saw Angry Birds, she wasn’t too surprised – she just said that I’d been drawing pigs since I was in school.” ![]() He explained: “We required an enemy and for some reason I’ve been drawing pigs for a long time. They agreed on Angry Birds, a game where birds are slung into the air to kill egg-stealing pigs. He focused on what was popular at the time, namely “two-dimensional physics-based” games – “especially the kind where you launched something in the air”. Angry Birds helped Finns fly againįinnish games firm Rovio was facing bankruptcy when designer Jaakko Iisalo pitched “lots of ideas” to save the company. Here are some of the apps that rocked the world. The more a game is played, the more advertising they can sell and the value skyrockets.” “But if someone does strike gold, the rewards are huge. “For every app that earns millions there are countless others earning little or nothing. “These instances of people becoming millionaires are very rare,” he says. The amount of cash generated by such a simple idea seems incredible but the world of app-making is not always a gold rush, says technology writer Rob Temple. Phones with the app installed have now been listed on eBay at up to £1million. Now millions of players are mourning its loss after creator Dong Nguyen deleted the game – even though it was raking in £30,000 a day in advertising.įlappy Bird, which launched in May, had been downloaded more than 50 million times, making it the most popular mobile phone game this year. Fiendishly addictive, simple to play and free to download, Flappy Bird was a smartphone smash hit.
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