One indie publisher says the industry is in a “death cycle” where it’s harder than ever to get a game deal and the big studios are taking more and more revenue.
In an interview with Game developerMike Rose, founder of publishing label No More Robots, described the difficulties his company has had to overcome in recent years. Xbox Game Pass deals “are no longer available,” he says, despite being a key revenue generator for the company in the past. Another major issue, the Steam Summer Sale, used to make No More Robots a “year of spending.” Now, he claims, “exclusively AAA sellers have paid for those slots,” and his company can only see a “small increase in revenue.”
“Steam makes more money,” Rose claims, “but about 50 percent of that revenue comes from one percent of games.”
That puts publishers like Rose in a difficult position when they want to take a risk on a new project. His strategy is to buy up several games that “are all coming out next year, and the hope is that they all pay for themselves very quickly.” All of these are “very cheap and quick projects that come off the shelf” – a trend that he believes is likely to become more pronounced in the coming years.
Rose believes that games need to be either “cheap or expensive” for developers. He explains that publishers like his will take on the smaller projects, while larger companies like Devolver Digital will be willing to spend a lot more because “if they sign a mediocre game for $400,000, it looks weak. It looks like they’re signing a small game.”
The number of layoffs across the industry in recent years has been a major topic of conversation. At the end of last month Destiny 2 developer Bungie was the last studio to announce layoffswith 220 employees losing their jobs and 155 more being integrated into the wider Sony ecosystem. But while the 10,000+ jobs lost are the headlines, the vulnerability of the indie industry is a less visible extension of the same problems. Less money being invested in the industry means fewer projects are getting greenlit or surviving to release, which in turn has its own ripple effects on the rest of the industry (a phenomenon that sketched by Hyper Light Breaker developer Alx Preston during GDC). Projects can survive, but to do so they must adapt, and that means publishers like Rose must do the same.
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