Necrosoft Games was is running out of money. At the rate things were going, the studio’s head, Brandon Sheffield, assumed the company would be bankrupt before its current project, a Person-like a role-playing game called School of Demonssent in September.
This was March, and the outlook was bleak. The funding climate for video games was dangerously bad, especially for small projects, and layoffs seemed to happen at studios across the industry on an almost weekly basis. Then, a Hail Mary: Sheffield, an industry veteran with over a decade of experience, was able to secure a contract for Necrosoft to do some work on another game. It wasn’t an ideal situation: the studio would have to do the work while also finishing up School of Demons—But it was a necessary decision. “It was the only way to survive, because nobody was financing anything,” he says. “It is also better than what is happening to many people, who simply have to give up.”
The studio’s problems are not the only ones. After a tough year of layoffs in 2023, GamesIndustry.biz reported In January, company executives were already considering 2024 to be “the year of closures.” After a hiring boom during the Covid-19 pandemic, things have cooled down and now many game developers are saying maladministration is making things worse. The avenues that smaller developers could rely on to make money, such as offering their games as exclusives on the Epic Games Store or Microsoft Game Pass, are no longer open. In March, Chris Bourassa, director of Kill the needle Developer Mega Crit put it bluntly in an interview with PC Gamer:“The gold rush is over.”
Necrosoft bought itself the time it needed to get its game across the finish line, but now, like so many other small developers, it remains in a precarious position. “All our hopes depend on this game being a success,” says Sheffield. “That’s obviously a bad situation.”
As the sector contracts, independent promoters are disappearing everywhere. While some cling to the hopeful refrain of “surviving until 25” (i.e. surviving this brutal year in the hope that prospects will improve in the next), others are less optimistic.
“‘Surviving until the 25th’ means we are facing a long winter rather than having burned our own crops for the previous three years,” says Xalavier Nelson, the study’s director. El Paso, somewhere else Developer Strange Scaffold said: “Unless we start scaling differently, unless we start changing the way we work and think about making games, then we’re going to continue to see the highest highs and lowest lows that gaming has ever seen. And it could actually get worse.”
The videogames The industry seems to be in free fall. However, how each particular company lands depends on its size. When large companies like Microsoft, Unity, Electronic Arts, or Ubisoft want to tighten their belts, they make layoffs, but the company itself continues to exist. For independent game developers, the consequences are more existential. Since they are often run by small teams of less than a couple dozen people, tightening their belts can often mean simply shutting down.