Topical android games
A hat-trick of posts today. This one's something I've wanted to do for ages; it was something we fancied trying out under the Fat Parrot brand, but have never quite gotten to. I alluded to it in my post about Fat Parrot, but here's a bit more detail.
The Android marketplace has no approval, and lets you launch games within minutes. One of the things I remember from my computing teacher at secondary school was a quote he was fond of: "bigger problems don't mean bigger solutions, they mean different solutions". Scale brings differences in approach. Big O Notation and all that.
So Android's lack of approval doesn't just let you do stuff faster than Apple and Nokia will allow you to, it opens up completely new opportunities. Then consider Wieden & Kennedy doing that lovely reactive Old Spice stuff on Twitter: you can streamline production of even high-quality content and do it "live".
So imagine taking 5-7 different game formats: sliding tiles, puzzles, "catch a falling object", etc. - and being able and ready to reskin them in response to a news story, every day - and publish them, there and then. So that by 8am you have a few games in the marketplace which are simple enough for anyone to understand, and tied - perhaps amusingly - into something that's only just happened.
My gut is that this would let you see more sales from the effort you put into writing one of these games; that occasionally some of these games would go or be driven viral, and generate disproportionate returns; that the scarcity of deleting old games might even encourage downloads or sales; and that you'd have something which could scale across territories. You'd also get a chance to iterate daily (something few business do right now), learn what works and what doesn't, and get better, day in, day out.
6 game formats, daily launches, earning £50 each day in 5 territories doesn't feel unachievable and is about half a million a year in revenue.
Maybe one day...