Palm Developer Generates $50K Per Month Through Virtual Goods

Social games developer Self Aware Games announced today that it was earning upwards of $50,000 per month in revenue through sales of virtual goods in games played primarily on the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi mobile platforms, according to The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog. Self Aware Games's titles are based primarily on card games and include the titles Word Ace and Card Ace: Blackjack. Users can spend up to $100 a pop in these games on virtual goods including virtual drinks and poker chips.  

While the Self Aware Games publishes its games on iPhone and Facebook, the company says that the vast majority of its players register on Palm mobile handsets. Currently Self Aware Game's apps are gaining tens of thousands of new users per day. The company attributes this to the overall low number of apps available in the Palm App Catalog, roughly 2,100. Apple's App Store pays host to over 140,000 apps, which makes it harder for new apps to get noticed. 

There are also physical differences between the platforms to take into consideration. Palm devices ship with physical keyboards and the ability to multi-task, which may make use of certain apps more attractive to Palm users than their iPhone counterparts. Unfortunately, Palm recently reported that its mobile devices were not achieving expected sales milestones and predicted revenue "well below" forecasts. 

Self Aware Games's success still suggests, however, that new mobile platforms may be far more hospital to development start-ups than Apple's overcrowded App Store. This could mean interesting things for future development on mobile platforms like Android and Windows Mobile 7. 

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