After being in development for more than nine years, Owlboy was finally launched by independent game developer D-Pad Studio. The platform-adventure PC game was released on November 1 on online digital game stores Steam, GOG, and the Humble Store.

Gaming news site GamingBolt reported that indie platformer Owlboy was already available on Steam as of November 1. According to another gaming news site, Gematsu, Owlboy was also available for purchase on GOG and the Humble Store on the same day. The confirmation of a successful and on-schedule launch would mean that D-Pad Studio had everything truly completed, prepared, and planned since they were able to follow the release schedule that they had announced a few months prior, as shown on the gaming news site PC Gamer. This smooth and orderly final stretch stands in stark contrast to the years of uncertainty and aimlessness of a seemingly endless development struggle such as the one described in the magazine Vice.

D-Pad Studios is a game development team composed of five people based in Norway. The studio was officially started in 2010 after art director Simon Andersen brought the rest of the team together to work on the game he had conceived back in 2007 which would eventually become Owlboy. Andersen felt they could release Owlboy by 2011 but that got pushed back further and further as time passed.

Eventually D-Pad Studios released a game called Savant: Ascent in 2013 that received good reviews and sold enough to help keep the team afloat financially. After being overworked, exhausted and being utterly spent, the team would finally find relief following a successful and orderly launch and then receiving very positive reviews for Owlboy from the whole gaming community, critics and users alike. So far, Owlboy has a score of 90 on Metacritic based on 18 critic reviews, indicating universal acclaim. It has a 98.3 percent positive rating among 295 users on Steam and it has an average rating of 4.5 out 5 from 39 user votes on GOG.