Gunpoint success allows dev to become independent, Mac and Linux ports on the way
Writer and developer Tom Francis originally planned his game, Gunpoint, as a showcase piece to earn him a job at a game development studio, but after seeing the success of the title so far he says he doesn't need to join another studio.
As you can see above, Francis hit his initial goal for the game from preorders alone, and sales have only gone up since then, to the point where Francis now says designing the game was "so commercially successful that I'll never need" to work for someone else.
Since the only real monetary cost of the project was a $30 purchase of Game Maker 8 a few years ago, Francis says Gunpoint "recouped its development costs" in just one minute and four seconds. That's after three years of work, of course, but the point remains that Gunpoint was very successful indeed.
The next priority, says Francis, will be to port Gunpoint to the newer Game Maker Studio, where it can then be released for Windows, Mac, and Linux. He's looking to hire someone for this task, so he can get moving on actual updates and another project eventually. It sounds like a tough job, essentially taking over the core game's development for other platforms. "But as the graphs above should suggest," says Francis, "I can pay."
