In 2020, two years after its release, Innersloth’s social deduction game, Among usit was the world Most downloaded The mobile title generated millions of dollars and gave the developer not only the money needed to stay afloat, but also enough to help other independent companies make their own games. With Outersloth, a new fund Innersloth announced earlier this month, the company set out to help them escape the perils of the traditional publishing cycle. Now, the initiative is ready to do much more.
Outersloth is far from the first of its kind; others, such as Indie Fund and Moonrise background, they also focus on supporting smaller creators. But it comes at a time when the video game industry is more tumultuous than ever. Just last year, thousands of jobs have been lost and studios large and small, from Arkane Austin and Pieces Interactive to Die Gute Fabrik, have closed. Even smaller developers like Tango Gameworks, acquired by big companies, aren’t safe; Microsoft shut down Tango in May.
While many companies are tightening their budgets, Innersloth is expanding. Outersloth is Innersloth’s effort to make the industry as a whole more sustainable, says Victoria Tran, the company’s director of communications.
“Outersloth is supposed to help independent businesses that want to be self-sufficient and just need a little push,” says Tran. “Giving them the opportunity to be successful and hopefully earn enough on their next game so that they don’t have to go back to the cycle of finding funding and a publisher, because it can be quite exhausting.”
Innersloth veterans know this well. Smaller studios face problems that larger developers don’t. Sometimes they lack experience; Sometimes they create games that are strange or experimental and don’t seem like a big hit to potential investors. Developers seeking small sums for their games also do not seem to deserve the attention of funders. Even Among us At the beginning he could not find financing. “There are so many games that need or deserve to be made,” Tran says, “but there’s just no real funding for them.”
Outersloth doesn’t have strict rules about who it will help, although it will say no to blockchain or AI games. His model is very practical. No one from the company asks to give notes on the games it supports. In their placedescribed the tone for Hold click—a project announced this week by developer Strange Scaffold—as “a story so unhinged and disturbing that it blew up an entire room.” For the Outersloth team, it had the makings of a good bet.
Deals like this, Tran says, can help independent companies avoid the kind of bad contracts she and her colleagues have seen during their time in gaming. Similar to the advances many artists get for their first albums, there are often stipulations in those deals that make it difficult for smaller game studios to recoup their costs. So even once they gain some acceptance, they are not out of the woods; They may still have to pay for marketing and give some of their profits to publishers. “Once a game comes out, you at least want to have a share of the revenue when it’s released, or else you won’t be able to survive as a studio,” Tran says.