Casey Yano, co-founder of Mega Crit Games, who you can get to know through the game Slay the Spire, was present at the Game Developers Conference and in a conversation about the current state of the industry, shared that indie studios are also facing a tumultuous period, marked by significant cuts in funding.
In his conversation with PCGamer, Yano said that “I spoke to at least five small teams, 35 people or less, during GDC and they all talked about cuts, cuts, cuts, canceled funding, conversations that had been going on for a year, cancelled. ”
“Sounds shit. We were definitely very privileged to be able to finance ourselves. Otherwise, I would be very, very, very scared right now.”
Chris Bourassa, director of Darkest Dungeon at Red Hook Studios, added that agreements with Microsoft to put games on Game Pass have “declined in scale” and even Epic itself no longer presents the phenomenal proposals it once did.
“The gold rush is over. I come from the Northwest Territories. My city was built on gold and then they found diamonds further north. Maybe another paradigm shift is waiting for us, but I do think that the scale of these businesses I hear about has diminished significantly since the big times. We really got our deal with Epic at the right time.”
This information is in line with what other indie creators have shared about Apple and its Apple Arcade service, suggesting that the times when companies paid significant sums to debut indies is a thing of the past.
