Zombie Karts Sales: How Much Can a Kart Game Make?

The vast majority of us have limited amounts of time and money. As such, we naturally seek to mitigate our risk and take the surest development bets. After exactly 28 days of sales, I can now say that the TGB Kart Kit is a good bet.

As I noted in my previous blog, I was able to take TGB Kart Kit v1.1 plus 4 weeks of time for content creation and coding, and release the game Zombie Karts to the App Store. Four weeks, admittedly, isn't enough time to put true polish on a game. But I was on a mission and out to prove a point: creating and selling a game with the kit is easy. I'll even further admit that I've taken an additional week of part time work to create more content, optimize performance, and integrate OpenFeint into the game for versions 1.1 and the soon-to-be-released version 1.2 of Zombie Karts.




Point being, how much money can one make off of 5 weeks of part-time work plus $50 for a kit? As it turns out, quite a bit! Here are my sales figures for Zombie Karts thus far:



(Note that weeks 1 and 5 are partial weeks that add up to 7 days combined.)

The big spike came from Apple featuring the game in "Hot New Games." And why not? How often are (semi)3D racing games launched? Not often -- and most by "big" developers. Additionally, the game remains in the "New and Noteworthy" section of iTunes. But let me state this: if I can crank out a no-frills kart game with programmer art and sell over 1200 copies in 4 weeks, anyone with the kit and a vision should be able to do better. To put that in dollars, 1200 games is $840 revenue pre-tax. That's nearly $800 profit from a $50 kit! Is that going to buy you a car or make you rich? No. But it's a handy chunk of change to reinvest into your development.

In my next blog, I will describe the next big update to the TGB Kart Kit and the direction I plan on taking it.