Boy this game development thing sure is fickle, huh" A couple of months back, two-person studio Stay Inside Games released a weird and wonderful turn-based roguelike called Bounty Hunter Space Lizard (Free) onto mobile. It offered an absurd premise, wacky characters, and extremely solid tactical dungeon crawling. We enjoyed it so much we chose it as our Game of the Week when it released, and players in our community also took quite a shining to the game. Overall it seemed like a hugely successful launch for the tiny team who had spent several years on the project, and Bounty Hunter Space Lizard’s seemed to be the latest example of the indie dream coming true.
Except that this is mobile. We play by a different set of rules around these parts. Hell, there aren’t even any rules now that I think about it. The truth is that Bounty Hunter Space Lizard did have a pretty great launch as far as these things go, amassing several thousand downloads in the first few weeks. It also made about $200 in those first weeks, which is? not bad nowadays" Then for the entire month of November it raked in all of $6. And well, that kind of leads us into this week when Stay Inside Games decided to heck with it all and permanently removed all the monetization from Bounty Hunter Space Lizard and simply made it totally free for anyone and everyone to enjoy.
So what happened" Well, a lot of things actually, as Stay Inside spells out in their blog post explaining the demonet...