It's a miracle that indie games come out at all really.
Battlesloths is mostly a no budget game. When we were originally making it I was unemployed living off a credit card. Battlesloths was something I worked on while looking for another job. Then humble bundle came along and really dug our game. We were one of the early humble original games (the second one, I think) so a lot of the process was still pretty early. For example, we are before the trove program had been conceived.
The humble original deal amounted to something like 15 cents per game. It funded about 1 months worth of development. Which was enough to get some hardware to make sure the mac build wasn't busted, get a good score from Jason Graves, and a sweet rap song from some of our nerd core friends. Almost all of the money was spent on marketing and development.
battlesloths 2025 was far more substantial, taking almost a year, making at least one developer completely broke (me) and putting mental and physical health in a pretty bad state. We really put it all on the line. Adding online was not easy.
There was a disagreement about how we dealt with the humble bundle keys obligation.
Personally... I didn't think it was a big deal. In a userbase that factors in the millions, ~120K keys out in the wild could only help get us noticed. Even still... what percentage of humble subscribers would have even looked at our game had it not been in that bundle. I figured even 2 years ago that only a small percentage of humble monthly subs would even use those keys. So I pushed for what is now known as "2025" to be distributed. It was unfortunately a deal breaker leaving us with a hard decision of whether we go it alone or get with a publisher. Hence... Battlesloths became Battlesloths 2025, a sequel.
The plan was to circle back when I had time and whip together a steam version of the classic edition. It just never became viable. Having 2 battlesloths skus on steam would have been confusing too. When the contract expired... it just made more sense to honor our original promise to fans to give these keys.
Better late than never, right?