With all the nastiness coming out of the AAA space for the past few, uh, years, I’ve found myself wanting more and more to celebrate every W collected by small time developers and passion projects. Today’s bit of good news: Mouse: P. I. For Hire hitting a massive, million player milestone! Congrats to everyone over at Fumi Games and PlaySide Studios!

It’s not just one million players either, but over a million sales too. Also, those sales seem to be split evenly between PC and console players. This was also accomplished in only 3 months too, which I think is pretty huge for a game like this. What’s more, this coincides with both the game’s physical release, “Mouse: P.I. For Hire – Mouseberg Edition,” and a big update that finally adds a level replay feature to the package.

I love seeing games like this succeed because not only are they genuinely fun experiences, but they’re real, tangible proof that the overly bloated slop that AAA has been churning out is exactly that and not “financial reality” that they would have us all believe about their games and production budgets. A reasonably-sized project, made with a reasonably-sized team and crafted to be fun first and foremost can, in fact, make good money.

There was a time when AAA games didn’t have to be mega-blockbusters in order to “meet expectations,” and that time could come again if only all these ridiculous corporations weren’t completely addicted to gambling everything on singular projects in hopes that they’ll hit the Fortnite super jackpot (which, by the way, wasn’t even good enough for Fortnite’s owner, Epic Games).

So, congrats again to everyone behind Mouse: P.I. For Hire and good luck with whatever your next project is!

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Have you played Mouse: P.I. For Hire? Have any indie Ws of your own to share?

Image from the Steam Page