Photo Game App Buckshot Finds Buyer on eBay

Neal Schmidt of Mesa, Arizona, sold his Buckshot app for $16,000 on eBay.

Image: Nekrasov Andrey/Shutterstock

On Tuesday, we reported on app developer Neal Schmidt, who was fed up with Apple and looking to sever ties with the company. Last week, Schmidt offered his app Buckshot on eBay for $1, and by the time the original article was published, it was already selling for $3,900. Today, that app sold for $16,600.

Buckshot is a multiplayer photo scavenger hunt game that has been downloadable since May of 2011 and generates approximately $300 a month, according to the eBay posting. The numbers aren’t huge, but Schmidt's eBay sales experiment is certainly interesting food for thought for other developers looking to get out of the business, or entrepreneurs looking to “go public” all on their own.

Schmidt, a 28-year-old man based in Chicago, told Portfolio.com he was fed up with the hoops Apple forced him to jump through and the control they exercised over the actual development of the app, describing the final product as a "dumbed-down" version of what he originally envisioned. In the end, he determined the time he invested dealing with Apple just wasn't worth the 30 percent cut the computer and mobility giant took off the top of everything he earned. He just wanted out.

He posted the sale on his blog, tweeted it once, and then three days later reached out to Reddit. After a night's rest he woke up to an email from TechCrunch, and within two hours of publication of an article on the influential tech blog, Buckshot's asking price had skyrocketed 1,900 percent.

"I thought to myself how crazy it would be if it reached $10,000—but then it just kept growing," Schmidt told Portfolio.com. His next project, "a bit more useful, less gamey," is code-named The Lobbyist and will likely be written in HTML5. He described it as an app to give people more control over their elected leaders by holding them accountable for their actions. No word on when to expect the app.

Schmidt’s success bodes well for online marketplace Apptopia, which is due to launch in February 2012 and is basically eBay for exactly this purpose. It allows developers to sell their mobile apps, source code, and rights to the highest bidder. TechCrunch reports the expected price for purchasing an app from Apptopia will likely range between $5,000 and $50,000.