Indie games need to be "cheap as f*** or expensive as hell," says publisher warning of industry "death cycle"

One indie publisher says the industry is in a "death cycle," where it's harder than ever to get a game signed, and more and more revenue is being hoovered up by major studios.

In an interview with Game Developer, Mike Rose, founder of publishing label No More Robots, outlined the difficulties his company has had to find ways around in recent years. Deals with Xbox Game Pass "[aren't] available any more," he says, despite having been an important revenue tool for the company in the past. Another tentpole, the Steam Summer Sale, used to make No More Robots "a year of burn rate." Now, he claims, "it's absolutely AAA all the way down that have paid for those slots," and his company is only able to earn a "little spike" in revenue.

"Steam is making more money," Rose claims, "but like 50 percent of that revenue is being generated by one percent of the games." 

That leaves publishers like Rose in a difficult position when it comes to taking a gamble on a new project. His strategy has been to pick up several games that "are all going to come out within the next year, and the hope is that they'll all recoup very quickly." All of those, he says are "very cheap and quick, out-of-the-door projects" - a trend he thinks is likely to be pretty substantial in the coming years.

For devs, Rose thinks that games will need to be "either cheap as fuck or expensive as hell," explaining that publishers like his will pick up the smaller projects, while larger companies, like Devolver Digital, will look to spend far more, because "if they sign a middling game for $400,000, it looks weak. It looks like they're signing a small game."

The number of layoffs across the industry in the past couple of years has been a major talking point. Late last month, Destiny 2 developer Bungie was the latest studio to announce redundancies, with 220 staff losing their jobs and 155 more having their roles folded into the wider Sony ecosystem. But while the 10,000+ jobs lost are the headline feature, indie vulnerability is a less-visible extension of the same issues. Less money invested in the industry means fewer projects get greenlit, or survive to release, which has its own knock-on effect on the rest of the industry (a phenomenon that was outlined by Hyper Light Breaker developer Alx Preston during GDC). Projects might survive, but they have to adapt to do so, and that means that publishers like Rose have to do the same.

Keep an eye out with our list of upcoming indie games.