For the last long while now, Facebook has been flooded with dumb, useful, stupid and fun widgets and apps. Many of you out there have no doubt been bitten by vampires, told who your true love is, played poker, gotten yourself a fun wall, become a slayer, seen daily babes, cheat in scrabble, or gained heroes abilities in your time using Facebook. Perhaps some of you have played the game Mob Wars.
Apparently, the Facebook game Mob Wars is one of the most lucrative Facebook apps. The game has about 500,000 players a day, and through the use of micro-payments, quite possibly rakes in more than one million clams a month (source). Yes, $1,000,000. The advertising revenue for the game provides an additional small bonus of about $22,000 a month for the game's maker.
This is fairly impressive -- a great deal of console and PC game makers would love to make a million a month off of their game. But what is more impressive, of course, is that Mob Wars was a relatively simple game to make, featuring a lot of text, simple game mechanics, and simple graphics -- in many ways, it reminiscent of simple games of the pre-World Wide Web, electronic BBS days.
Besides showing that even today, a very small team of programmers are still capable of making a lot cash from a game, the game's creator, David Maestri is also showing through the success of Mob Wars what an angry game company is like: David Maestri is getting sued by his previous employer, Social Gaming Network.
Mr. Maestri was employed by SGN while he made Mob Wars, so SGN is suing for him for breach of contract and stealing trade secrets, amongst other things. No word on when the case goes to trial.
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