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Note: Fire Maple Games owner Joe Kauffman says his secret is great entertainment. But his success story also includes Corona SDK, a programming tool that fuels iOS, Android, and soon OS X apps from one code base.
Joe Kauffman is living the mobile app developer dream. His company's two mobile games, The Secret of Grisly Manor and The Lost City, have been downloaded over 3.5 million times to date, and have generated more than $1 million in revenue.
His company, Fire Maple Games, has one employee, if you ignore the photographic work done by a friend and the contracted music.
"Because I do the art and the programming, there are no arguments," Kauffman quipped in a phone interview.
Without doubt, Kauffman is an exception in an industry where the average developer earns less than $10,000 per year.
Mobile developer Insurgent Games last month gave up on the game business and gave away the source code of the company's five apps because, as the company explains on its website, founders Micah Lee and Crystal Mayer "quickly realized that unless you're incredibly lucky, it's hard to make enough money developing indie mobile games to pay San Francisco rent."
[ Read 10 Android App Hidden Gems. ]
San Francisco, incidentally, is where the Game Developer's Conference is being held this week. It's chock full of sessions about how to be a successful game developer, to do what Joe Kauffman has done.
Kauffman is the first Corona SDK developer to hit the million dollar mark, an...