These Guys Are Making Over $1,000 A Day On Windows Phone Game
Here's a great success story for Windows Phone 7. — A year ago, FourBros Studio launched a free Windows Phone game called Taptitude. As of today, the company has pulled in over $100,000 of revenue on the game, with more than 300,000 users.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has spent the past year trying to solve its Windows Phone chicken-and-egg problem: the Marketplace leaned heavily on free content through late 2011, and just two weeks ago Computerworld reported Microsoft will pay developers up to $600,000 per app to fill the catalog. The open question was whether anyone could earn real money organically, without a subsidy.
FourBros Studio's answer is Taptitude — a free game launched around April 2011 that has cleared $100,000 in revenue on more than 300,000 users, per Business Insider and pickups by WebProNews. It is the kind of bootstrapped indie win the corpus has seen before on bigger platforms: Tapulous on the iPhone in 2009 and indie Facebook developers pulling $700K a month that same year. The story matters because it is Microsoft's first homegrown proof point at this scale.
First-order effects
- FourBros Studio becomes a reference customer for Windows Phone: its ~$1,000/day run rate gives Microsoft a concrete rebuttal to the 'nobody makes money there' objection that shapes developer decisions.
- Other Windows Phone 7 studios now have evidence that ad- and purchase-driven monetization works on a small user base of 300,000, lowering the perceived risk of building for the platform.
Second-order effects
- iOS and Android indie shops facing saturated app stores face a new arbitrage calculus: a smaller catalog means Taptitude-style visibility, echoing how early-mover Facebook and iPhone developers captured outsized revenue in 2009.
- The success story reduces Microsoft's dependence on its own subsidy program — paid placements up to $600,000 per app were designed to bootstrap exactly this kind of organic revenue, so every FourBros-style result stretches the program's budget.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, small platforms compete for developers less on direct payouts and more on demonstrated monetization-per-user stories, making published indie revenue figures a standard weapon in platform marketing.
- Free-to-play monetization — ads plus in-app purchases on a free base game — cements itself as the default indie model across mobile platforms rather than an iOS-specific phenomenon.
The trend: Mobile game monetization built on free downloads is spreading from iOS to challenger platforms, with each platform needing its own breakout indie revenue story to attract developers.