A new iPhone game created by two Australians and downloaded by more than 7.1 million people so far has wasted approximately 566 years of players' time while earning its creators a seven-figure income.
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Called Crossy Road and built by Victorians Andrew Sum, 24, and Matthew Hall, 39, the addictive app is a mix between 1981 arcade game Frogger and the wildly popular Flappy Bird, released earlier this year.
The aim is to get a high score while crossing a road as a virtual chicken or a range of other characters without getting hit by a train, truck or car, or falling into a river.
Released on Apple's App Store about three weeks ago, the two say their game has generated enough for them to retire.
"Seven figures is correct," Sum said, declining to reveal details.
Although the game is free to download, gamers can buy additional characters for $1.29 or watch 30 second advertisements to earn more coins, which allows them to acquire new characters. If each player downloads just one character, the game could be looking at $9.1 million in revenue.
But don't expect them to retire anytime soon.
"We won't need to make anything else after this but we probably will," Hall said.
Sum added: "Having the money is amazing but actually having something that's being played by so many people is really cool."
To celebrate their success, the creators said they simply slept and worked on updates for the app (it's coming out on Android January 8).
Sum, who still lives in the east Melbourne suburb of Canterbury with his parents, said he'd use the money to move out of home.
Hall said he'd like to buy a better car than his current Toyota Hilux. He is eyeing an electric Tesla.
The two game developers, who met over a year ago at a conference, never worked in the same office once while creating the game from their homes over a 12-week period beginning in late July.
"We did spend a lot of time on Skype," Hall, who lives near Ballarat, said. "There were a few 16-hour days in there."
A large part of their success is due to the world's most popular YouTuber, "PewDiePie", playing their app in a recent video. A similar video prompted Flappy Bird's meteoric rise earlier this year.
"Once PewDiePie ... mentioned it that gave us a really big spike that day," Hall said. "People keep talking about it so it's good, the numbers are still rising pretty rapidly."
Apple also featured it when it launched, helping it reach No. 1 on many App Store charts around the world.
Players can also collect coins in the game without watching ads, meaning they don't ever have to spend a cent or watch an advertisement to get new characters.
Hall said this was an experiment that seemed to be working.
"We always wanted to build a popular game but we didn't think we could build a game that could generate money," he said.
Unlike other games, he said Crossy Road was "very light" on wallets.
"Everyone else [in the industry] will tell you you need to squeeze people and you need to do this and hide [some things] behind a paywall," Hall said.
"[You're told that] if you're not making a Clash of Clans clone you are doing it wrong. I felt very, very strongly that there were other ways of doing this."
He said it took him about six weeks to play Crossy Road himself and collect all of the characters, although other players have done it in two weeks.
Hall, who, like Sum, has been making games since he was a kid, said one recent game in particular led to the creation of Crossy Road.
"I really wanted to make something Flappy Bird-ish," Hall said.
"That was the key instigator. Flappy Bird was such a big success this year; I wanted to make a game that had the same feeling but wasn't a clone."
