Gunpoint cost $30 to develop, then made enough that its creator can quit "jobs, as a concept"

Gunpoint developer Tom Francis has revealed that his stealthy platform puzzler Gunpoint was so wildly successful that he can quit all his other work and focus on game development full-time.

While Francis didn't reveal the exact sales figures for Gunpoint, he noted that it made six times his goal for what he considered good enough to "become a game developer."

"I think I have quit jobs, as a concept," Francis wrote on his blog. "I started Gunpoint as an audition piece to get myself a position at a developer, but designing it has been so creatively satisfying that I no longer want one, and so commercially successful that I'll never need one."

"I can now make games full-time for the foreseeable future," he added. "More amazingly, I can do it with total creative freedom. There's really no pressure for my next thing to make a particular amount of money, so I can do whatever I think will be most exciting."

Francis explained that his experiment in making a game was so profitable that he'll stick to his guns and always release free demos for his games. "I didn't let anyone pay for Gunpoint until I was ready to put a free demo out, so everyone would have a way to make sure it ran okay on their system and that they liked it before giving me any money," he explained, despite his industry friends advising against this. "I have no idea if and how much the pre-release demo hurt Gunpoint's sales, but it doesn't matter now - that's how I want to treat people, and the amazing support for Gunpoint means I can afford to."

Making Francis' story double inspiring, he noted that he only spent $30 to make the game as he simply bought Game Maker 8 three years ago. It took Gunpoint a whopping 64 seconds after being available for pre-order to recoup these funds.

Francis is using his new-found profits to hire someone to help him port Gunpoint to Mac and Linux, which I'm pretty sure makes him a studio head. Fancy! He's currently accepting applications.

"Springing around its miniature fortresses like a flea in a trenchcoat is a tactile pleasure in itself, and the rewiring concept is both simple in action and powerful in execution," wrote our Dan Whitehead in his Gunpoint review. "It would be nice if there was slightly more of it to enjoy, but Gunpoint comes highly recommended all the same."