Flap happy: How you too can become a mobile games mogul
Flappy Bird, the mobile-phone game that was making as much as $50,000 (£30,000) a day for its developer before he pulled it from online stores, took one man just two or three days to write.
It shows that there's still a place in the £40bn video games industry for independent makers, or indies, working alone.
And it's easier than you may think to build your own game that could potentially become a global hit, thanks to a growing number of marketplaces for off-the-peg games templates.
It turns out you don't even have to know how to write a single line of code to make a living selling mobile games on sites like Apple's App Store or Google's Play Android store.
Code marketplaces, like Binpress, Apptopia, Chupamobile and CodeCanyon, are offering game templates for a few hundred pounds.
These templates provide the program code required for a basic game, which buyers then flesh out by adding their own graphics, music and overall theme to make an app which is ready to be sold.
'Swipe to slice'
These types of games are usually offered as free apps, generating money through advertising included in the game. Even the code to display the ads, which are provided by online advertising networks, is included in the game template, so the buyer needs only add an account number with each network to start earning money.
"What you are buying with a template is a simple game mechanic - something like pressing on the screen to shoot something, or swiping the screen to slice," says Jonathan Kay, one of the founders of US-based code marketplace Apptopia. "That forms the basis of your app."
Buyers of a "swipe to slice" template could then create a fruit-slicing game similar to the popular Fruit Ninja app, or something with a different theme, like slicing the heads off leaping zombies, he says.
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