You Tried Your Best & You Failed Miserably. The Lesson is “Never Try”
From the Sneaky suspicion department: iPhone/iPod development doesn’t pay the bills. 
Hard work at iPhone/iPod development and pushing, pushing, pushing pay the bills. I think this dude is a brilliant marketer. He hit the front page of Slashdot and was slashdotted most of the morning. How many units did he sell today? More than a few I hope. I have the feeling that this is not the last we are going to hear of Dapple.
Regardless, go back to the how to hit 50 million users in 2 years and you’ll see how to do it.
Dapple
If you’ve been reading the blog then you know that I released my first iPhone game, Dapple, to the App Store on Feb 13, 2009. The game sells for $4.99 in Canada and the U.S. and at corresponding prices throughout the world.
Dapple is a colour-matching puzzle game based around the idea of mixing paint colours to make new colours. I feel like the gameplay is innovative and new, but rests on top of a solidly proven genre. Critical reviews seem to support this hypothesis, many calling out the fact that they were expecting “just another match-3 game”, but instead found themselves completely hooked on a game with an innovative gameplay mechanic that works.
Costs
I did a presentation for the 360|iDev conference on creating an iPhone game. If you’ve read it, then you’ve seen my “conclusions” section that had some numbers. Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).Streaming Colour Studios » Blog Archive » The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)
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