Game Oven Studios, the independent Dutch team behind body-morphing mobile games
Bounden,
Bam fu,
Fingle and
Friendstrap, will be disbanded in April, studio co-founder Adriaan de Jongh announced in
a blog post today. Game Oven will release its final game,
Jelly Reef, in March on iOS and Android. Game Oven developers de Jongh and Bojan Endrovski will continue to support
Bounden,
Fingle,
Bam fu and
Jelly Reef, but they will remove
Friendstrap from stores on February 1.
De Jongh and Endrovski founded Game Oven in November 2011 with their first game,
Fingle, which was nominated for an IGF Nuovo award.
Bounden, a two-player dancing game for mobile, is nominated this year for an IGF Nuovo prize and a GDC Innovation Award. Game Oven received financial support for
Bounden from the Dutch grant program, Game Fund, and worked with the Dutch National Ballet to create the choreography.
And, despite Game Oven's closure,
Bounden is doing "really well," de Jongh told me today.
"We're not making millions, no, but
Bounden's profit is larger than the development costs, so maybe awards are not that disconnected from the financial success of the game," he said. "With
Fingle, IGF helped us build an audience, helped us reach that critical mass, and even though we no longer do any marketing effort for
Fingle, we still make one minimum wage from the game every month. The way things look now, it seems like
Bounden is on that same road."
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