Vlambeer's Luftrausers became profitable in three days

Luftrausers, the latest game from Dutch indie studio Vlambeer, is already profitable just three days after its release, the company said today on Twitter.

"Luftrausers just became profitable," said Vlambeer at 1:01 a.m. ET today. "We are super overwhelmed and thankful."

Vlambeer and publisher Devolver Digital released the dogfighting game on Linux, Mac, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita and Windows for $9.99 on March 18. Since then, Vlambeer has racked up enough sales of Luftrausers to cover the cost of development, which took place over the past two and a half years.

That span included some major setbacks for Vlambeer. After the studio put out an early prototype of Luftrausers online as a free Flash game, another company developed its own take on it with a title called SkyFar and released it on the iTunes App Store in April 2013. The two-man team at Vlambeer said they were "extremely exhausted from dealing with cloning" — Rami Ismail, the studio's business and development half, had spent much of 2012 dealing with a similar situation for the game that would become Ridiculous Fishing. But they refused to back down from their strategy of publishing Flash games as prototypes, and fought the release of SkyFar; that title is no longer available on the iTunes App Store.

In addition, Ismail's backpack was stolen during E3 2013; among the items within were a PS Vita test kit and the code for Luftrausers. "We've got decent backups to continue working. It's just a giant pain," Ismail told Polygon at the time.

For more on Luftrausers, check out the Overview video below.