The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2020–2021
13 Bananas' 48-year-old co-founder launches paid Slingshot Effect, bucking free-to-play
A self-taught 48-year-old and her husband launched paid, ad-free mobile game Slingshot Effect, declining free-to-play publisher deals.
13 Bananas
What the business is
13 Bananas is a husband-and-wife indie studio selling small paid mobile games with no ads, IAPs or data collection; its debut title Slingshot Effect is an infinite jumper.
How it started
bananabat was born in a third-world Asian country, first touched a PC at university, and spent her adult life as copywriter, graphic designer, business owner, immigrant and stay-at-home parent. Around her 48th birthday, after two years in which, she wrote, 'we may not see tomorrow', she and her husband decided to finally learn game development together. She began with a Breakout clone in Unity, then switched to Godot when her weak C# and math foundation made Unity's abstraction and third-party plugins a crutch; her husband learned music production, and their son contributed ideas, credited as 'best ideas ever'.
What happened
After launch, hyper-casual publishers approached the studio offering free-with-IAP deals; 13 Bananas declined, calling industry-standard contract terms onerous and betting that a pool of mobile players would pay outright for a casual game. The HN thread doubled as live user testing: players flagged UX confusion, an iOS 15 minimum-version complaint and a typo in store screenshots, and the couple promised fixes while maintaining the game and sketching a pipeline of future titles.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
13 Bananas is a husband-and-wife indie studio whose first product, Slingshot Effect, is a paid infinite jumper with no ads, no in-app purchases and no data collection. The bet: a pool of mobile players will buy a casual game outright, tired of free-to-play monetization, and a two-person team can reach them without publishers or venture money. The launch post, written by co-founder bananabat, opens with her lifelong dream of making games and her decision at 48, after a career as copywriter, graphic designer, business owner, immigrant and stay-at-home parent, to finally learn.
Self-taught, bananabat started with a Breakout clone in Unity but switched to Godot when her lack of math and programming foundation made Unity's abstractions and asset-store plugins a crutch. Her husband learned music production, their son contributed ideas, and the game shipped as a paid app because, as she put it, casual-space monetization is 'ugh...it's bad'. The Show HN post reached 985 points and 252 comments on 2021-11-09 and stayed #1 on the front page; commenters bought it in-thread, praising the 'Data Not Collected' stance.
After launch, hyper-casual publishers approached the studio with free-to-play, IAP-based deals; 13 Bananas declined, citing onerous industry-standard contracts and its belief that players who dislike endless monetization will pay outright for a casual game, while leaving open a future publisher collaboration. The couple used the HN thread as user testing, promising fixes for UX confusion, an iOS 15 version requirement and a store-screenshot typo. No sales or download figures were disclosed.
What has to be true
- The monetization refusal was the product: a visible no-ads, no-IAP, no-data-collection promise made a generic jumper stand out, and commenters said the privacy stance was the reason they purchased.
- Free tools collapsed the barrier: Godot and free tutorials let a 48-year-old with no programming or math background ship a game, where entry costs had been prohibitive a few years earlier.
- Refusing publishers was affordable at their scale: with no investors or payroll, the studio could turn down free-to-play contracts and wait for players who dislike hyper-casual monetization.
- The founders separated dream from income — 'our dream and our income stream don't have to be the same thing' — so the first game did not need to be a commercial hit for the bet to be worth making.
What can be applied
A refusal can be positioning: charging upfront with no ads, IAPs or tracking made a simple jumper something people deliberately bought — even if it funded a dream, not an income.
Aftermath
As of 2021-11-09, Slingshot Effect was live on the App Store and Google Play as a paid app. The couple was maintaining it, working through feedback raised in the HN thread — UX confusion, an iOS 15 minimum-version complaint and a typo in store screenshots — and starting work on a pipeline of next game ideas, having declined the free-to-play publisher approaches made after launch. No sales, download or revenue figures were disclosed in the thread.
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