Before we wrote a single line of code, we wrote down what we'd never do:
No ads.
No pay-to-win.
No loot boxes.
Most free mobile games are free the way a free puppy is free — adorable until the costs arrive. A game stops to sell you a thirty-second video about a different game. The wins quietly go to whoever spends the most. Progress hides behind a slot machine you pay to pull.
We don't do that. Not the ads, not the pay-to-win, not the loot boxes — not as a launch promotion, not "for now." It's written into the studio's founding documents and it binds everything we ship, not just the first thing. The cat does not negotiate.
What we do instead is make the game good and play fair. Drop the blocks. Clear the row. Watch the cat judge your high score. You get a generous amount of free play every day, and everything that affects how you play is earnable by playing it. If you love it and want to support a one-person studio — or just skip a grind — you can. You never have to, and you can never buy your way to a win.
We're one person, an unreasonable number of cat photos, and a line we refuse to cross. We'd rather make a small thing right than a big thing that nags. If that sounds like a low bar, you have been playing the wrong games.
You can play, or just hang around for the cats. Both are allowed. The cat would prefer you stay, but is far too dignified to ask.
Why this exists
The mobile game business mostly runs on attention arbitrage: get the game free into your hands, then sell your attention back to you in pieces — ads, pay-to-win mechanics, loot boxes dressed up as "surprise." It works. It's also exhausting, and it quietly assumes you won't notice. You noticed.
KissyKat is the opposite bet: that a small, principled game can earn a real audience precisely because it refuses the worst of the playbook. No ads is not a feature we toggle. No pay-to-win is not a limited-time offer. A generous, fair game — free to play, everything that affects play earnable, money never a way to win — is the prime directive the studio was built on, and it binds every future title as hard as it binds this one.
We're built quiet and made on purpose. The founder trained as a fine artist before a couple of decades in software; the cats are art-directed by the same person who runs the studio. There's no growth team, no monetization team, no team. There's a person who likes cats and clean lines, and a rule he won't break.
That's the whole pitch. The rest is just whether the blocks land where you meant them to.