Gun Monkeys is now $5.99/ £3.99/ Eur4.49 , and you always get two copies with every purchase.



Flippantly speaking, there are three key hurdles in releasing a Video Game.

HURDLE ONE: MAKE A GOOD GAME. Gun Monkeys is generally picking up 8/10s. The guys playing it are loving it. I haven’t made a shitty game, and that’s a huge relief. HURDLE JUMPED SUCCESSFULLY.

HURDLE TWO: MAKE MONEY OFF IT. Gun Monkeys paid its development costs fairly quickly. HURDLE JUMPED SUCCESSFULLY. Making money is important for hurdle three:

HURDLE THREE: MAKE SURE EVERYONE’S HAVING A BRILLO TIME. It’s at this hurdle that I’ve oh-so-slightly mis-jumped, smacked my testicles into the hurdle and have gone arse over tit, my grinning face thumping directly onto the tarmac and knocking out my two front teeth.

So, Gun Monkeys needs players in order to play it. You need other people milling around. At times, the servers are quite busy, you can quite happily play for hours. At other times, they’re dead, because everyone who owns a copy of Gun Monkeys is at work or at school or sleeping or playing Rogue Legacy. You have to sell HYPER-LOTS of copies in order for the servers to have anyone in them, triply so if you’re trying to get a game at 4am. This is a fact I now know that I didn’t really appreciate before.

There are a few other things in the pipeline to help with this, but the bolded bit’s the main news: from today, the game is cheaper, and you can’t buy a ‘single’ copy of the game. In hindsight, one-key-per-customer was a STUPID idea. You’ll now always get two keys, so in theory you’ll always have someone to play against. What’s more, everyone who has bought the game thus far has been gifted a free copy to send to a chum (or TWO free copies if you bought the double pack)

If you’re a loyal Gun Monkeys player, hopefully you understand this change is all to help keep those servers busy. It’s something I’m doing *extremely* reluctantly, because I don’t want to devalue the game, I 100% think it’s worth $10. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the game’s multiplayer-only concept is a tough sell, so a pricing change is a necessary evil. It’s just not fair on the people who are playing and enjoying the game that they’re struggling to find people to play, so I’m doing everything in my power to remedy that. If you’re ANGRY, please do feel free to email me so we can discuss it.

Here’s the takeaway from this, for any indie dev considering adding multiplayer to a game: the number of games you have to sell in order to have people playing *constantly* is HUGE. Hugerer than you think, even. Even hugerer than your revised figure. It’s massive, and it might not happen.