2025-11-07 - GUNCHO

First year of GUNCHO

I wanted to give a small update on GUNCHO’s first year since it’s one of the more successful games we’ve released in recent years. GUNCHO was made in about 11 months with a team of three. As always, I was coding and doing most of the game design work, while Terri Vellmann was responsible for all 3D game art and animation. He also did lots of cool promotional artworks which we could use across multiple channels and formats.

In addition to great art, we also have, in my personal opinion, one of the best game soundtracks in any of our games by the amazing Sam Webster. Sam joined the project on a whim, I only knew his work from Capy’s Grindstone, but based on a loose Twitter conversation, we actually formed a super well-working team pretty quickly.

If you’re unfamiliar, GUNCHO is a small-scale tactical turn-based game where players control GUNCHO, a fierce pistolero battling bandits and outlaws. The game features randomly generated levels leading to a mysterious end boss you must defeat to complete a run.
While GUNCHO adheres closely to genre conventions, its unique gameplay hook is the 1:1 mapping of bullets in GUNCHO’s revolver cylinder to the game world. This mechanic means the direction GUNCHO’s current bullets face determines where he can shoot. This innovation introduces various gameplay consequences, thematically fitting the Wild West shootout setting perfectly.

Another thing to note is that GUNCHO was actually my first fully 3D title, having only worked on 2D card and strategy games before. The game itself is turn-based, so most of the gameplay works similarly to a 2D game with one exception: early on, the 3D camera rotation also influenced the cylinder rotation. We later simplified this mechanic so that it was no longer affected by the 3D camera, but instead controlled by a simple left/right rotation toggle on the cylinder UI.

Since the game had already proven to be fun in the little jam prototype we did for #7DRL, translating most mechanics and adding new and fun content in terms of enemies, skills, and bullet upgrades was quite straightforward, which also helped with development time.
The game released on June 25th, 2024 on iOS and Android, and we also worked on the PC Steam version that supports both mouse and controller input. This helped us get a pretty quick “Verified on Steam Deck” badge as well.
In the first year, we mostly did small gameplay and UI improvements. One bigger update was the Puzzle Mode, where you can actually see the enemies’ turn order Into the Breach-style.

In April 2025, we did our first major content update for GUNCHO, where we added three new Outlaws, each with unique weapon and attack mechanics, and for each one of them, a new track for the excellent soundtrack.

Besides this update, we haven’t done any other content updates yet, but we’d still love to do a second biome with a new endless mode and a few new level mechanics. However, since all of us are currently working on new projects, this might take a bit more time than we originally anticipated.

Revenue

Since GUNCHO’s sales are split across two stores, two platforms, and also include an ad component, looking at the different revenue sources is quite interesting.

On Steam, the game is a plain $5 purchase with no extra trappings. On mobile, the game is free to download, with a hard content gate for the full game at the same price, but all modes can be tested via rewarded ad gates. The same goes for the replay and revive mechanic, where free users are required to watch an ad before retrying a level. This way, free players can enjoy a large portion of the game, while paying users get a full ad-free version after purchasing.

Especially on mobile, the game was featured quite a bit, we even got Game of the Day in several countries, and on Google Play, I received a special developer feature, which wasn’t particularly about GUNCHO but still boosted awareness for the game.

In the first year, from June 25th, 2024 to 2025, the game made 123.033,40€ in net revenue after store fees.
From the total revenue, about 63.9% came from iOS in-app purchases, 13.2% from Google Play IAPs, 17.7% from ads on both iOS and Android, and only 5.2% came from Steam sales (where we also sell a bundle with the game’s soundtrack).

Total: 123.033,40€
Apple: 78.594,44€
Ads: 21.752,52€
Google Play: 16.279,27€
Steam: 6.407,17€

Which is about $143,431.72 for anyone outside of the EU reading this.

So once again, I’m happy with how well the game was received by players. It’s great to see that even after one year, lots of people still enjoy the dailies or battle it out on the completed Puzzle Mode leaderboards, where a few players have already surpassed 2000 completed levels.

And while we can’t promise anything at the moment, we really do want to return to the game at some point and maybe add some more cool stuff to it.

Thanks for reading and see you in the wild west!