A financially successful, breakout indie hit can be transformative for its developers. That money can be used to pay salaries and bonuses, reinvested in the company, or parked in savings for a rainy day. But a few studios have been using their windfalls to try to unfuck the video game publishing industry.
Indie studios including Innersloth, Pocketpair, Bigmode, and most recently Phasmophobia developer Kinetic Games have leveraged the success and profitability of their games (or in Bigmode’s case, a successful YouTube career) to spin up publishing endeavors that put innovation and sustainability over broad appeal and profit.
One thing all these companies have in common is viral success. Among Us and Phasmophobia, released by Innersloth and Kinetic Games, were among the defining games of the covid-19 pandemic. In January 2024, Pocketpair launched Palworld, selling over 5 million copies within the first three days. As the only non-developer on the list, Bigmode was started by Jason Gastrow, the content creator better known as videogamedunkey, who has over 7 million YouTube subscribers.
Success enabled the creation of all of these unconventional publishers, but was not always the reason they were founded. For the developers at Innersloth, the desire to start a publishing company came well before Among Us made it possible. “It's just something that I always wanted to do,” Forest Willard, lead programmer at Innersloth, told me. Before co-founding Innersloth, he worked as an engineer at Microsoft. There, he said he took advantage of a company culture that educated employees about personal investing but was uninterested in traditional investment vehicles or companies.
“Multiple years before the virality of Among Us, I was like, ‘Man, I wish I could do something that was actually with games as opposed to stocks.’” In 2024, he did, founding indie game fund Outersloth.
Starting a publishing studio so soon after the runaway success of Palworld wasn’t part of Pocketpair’s plan at all. According to publishing and communications director John Buckley, it happened because people kept asking them for money.
“I'm talking solo developers who have never made a game, all the way to some of the most established AAA companies on the planet,” he said. “Everyone's looking for funding these days, and Palworld certainly made a lot of money, so it seemed like a good place to connect.”
Intimate knowledge of the development process led Phasmophobia creator Daniel Knight to start Kinetic Publishing earlier this year. “This really grew out of my own journey with Phasmophobia,” he said over email. “As [the game] grew, so did the team and our understanding of what it takes to build something sustainably.”
In talking with these publishers, I heard about sustainability a lot, alongside the simple desire to just offer help. Jason Gastrow’s thriving YouTube career making video game content brought him and his wife Leah, in close contact with a lot of developers, who often shared with them their struggles. “I was like, ‘Oh, I wonder if somehow we could partner with and help them with funding or whatever,’” Leah Gastrow, co-founder of Bigmode, told me. According to Gastrow, her husband responded with, “yeah, that’s what publishers do.”
One Btn Bosses is one of Outersloth's earliest releases.
Terms of Endearment
But how publishers traditionally fund games is one of the fundamental reasons why “sustainability” and “helping developers” came up in every conversation I had. Despite their differing origin stories, all these unconventional publishers are responding to the same problems embedded in the publishing side of games.
Finding a publishing partner in a healthy video game industry was already fraught. Before digital distribution channels made it easier for indie studios to self-publish, they often sought support from traditional publishers. But these huge companies with household names like Sony, Microsoft, and Activision, with their publicly traded stock and shareholder overlords, are notoriously risk averse. They typically fund established studios making trend-chasing games that are best positioned to ensure a return on their investment.
A game could be profitable on day one of its release, but the studio could still close because the publisher gets its cut first.
In the last decade, however, new publishers like Devolver Digital, Hooded Horse, Annapurna Interactive, Playstack, and more have cropped up, offering more opportunities to the smaller outfits making weirder games. But as the industry continues through this current period of destabilization with rampant layoffs, studio closings, and cancelled projects, publishers of all stripes are tightening their belts. And even when a studio does manage to snag a publisher, that partnership may not guarantee the studio’s survival.
“One horrible thing that exists within the industry is the use of recoup terms in contracts between publishers and developers,” said Tim Bender, co-founder of Hooded Horse, in an interview with gamedeveloper.com. It’s expensive and time consuming to make a game, so in exchange for funding and development support, publishers get a cut of the revenue. But often, contracts between studio and publisher are designed such that until a publisher’s initial investment is recouped, it doesn’t merely get a portion of a game’s profit, but all of it. A game could be profitable on day one of its release, but the studio could still close because the publisher gets its cut first.
“We don’t do that,” said John Buckley at Pocketpair. “The moment the game goes on sale, the developers start earning revenue straight away.” He also says Pocketpair ensures revenue splits favor the developer. Outersloth’s terms are similarly favorable, to the point that prospective clients sometimes don’t believe they’re real. “More than twice, I've heard back from lawyers like, ‘This is a scam. [The terms] were too good,’” said Victoria Tran, communications director at Outersloth.
Cassette Boy, published by Pocketpair Publishing, is a trippy, forced-perspective puzzle game.
Shorter Games with Worse Graphics
The success of Fortnite spawned many, many imitators with varying levels of success. Studios and publishers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on development of live-service games in hopes of recouping billions in revenue. But often that revenue didn’t appear, either because of poor quality or “live service fatigue” leading to cancelled projects and shuttered studios. In 2025, Sony published the live service shooter Concord, developed by Firewalk Studios. It took eight years and $200 million to develop, but Sony shut down the game and Firewalk barely a month post-launch. Elsewhere in Sony’s publishing portfolio, the developmentally fraught Marathon releases later this year.
None of these new publishers are looking for the next Fortnite. And when I asked what they were looking for, sometimes even they didn’t know. “We’re open to so much,” said Forest Willard, co-founder of Outersloth. He eventually settled on novelty being the best way to describe what they’re looking for in a game. “It needs to hook us in some way,” he said. “It needs something that sells the vision to us.”
"The sheer enthusiasm they have when they talk about their game. I mean, it's impossible for us not to just say, ‘Sure, take the money.’"
They’re looking beyond the game too. Outersloth signed One Btn Bosses because of its developers. “They made me feel like, regardless of whether their game did well or not, they would continue to make games,” Willard said. “Their passion was behind it. And I just wanted to give them that chance.”
Developer passion was also why Pocketpair signed Dead Take, an FMV horror game, on the strength of the pitch alone. Buckley talked about how, in the pitches he receives, he can get the sense a developer is pitching a game because they think it’ll make money. “But then you sit down with people like [the developers of] Truckful,” he said. “The sheer enthusiasm they have when they talk about their game. I mean, it's impossible for us not to just say, ‘Sure, take the money.’”
Pocketpair Publishing's first title is Dead Take, an FMV horror game staring Ben Starr and Neil Newbon.
Bigmode had the firmest idea for what they want, preferring games in which gameplay is the central appeal. “Finding the depth in the gameplay is what really excites us the most,” Leah Gastrow said. Of all the publishers I spoke to, Bigmode is the one choosing games with similar mechanics and aesthetics. Both their releases, Animal Well and Star of Providence, are action games with puzzle elements and very little dialogue. Gastrow explained that tailoring their releases to a more narrow lane of games sets expectations in players.
Hooded Horse, another indie publishing company, operates in a similar fashion, signing only tactical and strategy games. In publishing similar games, Bigmode can cut through the noise of saturated digital marketplaces to target players directly.
“Publishers, when they're done well, can really help consumers and point them in the direction of things they might like,” Gastrow said.
Looking Ahead
Favorable terms and games signed based on vibes sounds like corporate altruism, but it’s working out for these publishers. Profitability is of course a concern, but these companies are willing to wait longer to earn a smaller cut than what big publishers take. “We don't necessarily need to recoup our money ASAP,” Buckley said. “That's why we can have these more generous terms.”
Acquiring profit slowly limits how many games these publishers can sustainably sign. Rather than pumping out games assembly-line style, they have more time to spend with each release.
“We only have two releases right now,” Gastrow said. “We're trying to give things enough breathing room where they get the focus that they need.”
That extra time has led to profit. Victoria Tran said that Mars First Logistics, one of Outersloth’s first games, launched to immediate success. Bigmode is doing well too.
“The goal for any business is to operate above the red and so far we're totally succeeding at that goal,” said Gastrow.
They’re also measuring success beyond profitability. Forest Willard at Outersloth explained that enabling a developer’s second chance by giving them a first is as worthy a goal as money. “Sometimes having a game be made is the success,” he said.
No publisher shared the details of just how much their games have been profitable. In my conversations, all of them acknowledged that every game they sign won’t be. How these companies manage risk and failure will be the key to their survival, and funding smaller, cheaper games based on a vision and not profitability projections seems to be working.
The publishers I spoke to know they can’t “save” the games industry from its current troubles, but they can try.
“What we can do is contribute in small, positive ways,” said Asim Tanvir, director of marketing and partnerships at Kinetic Publishing. “Encouraging sustainable practices, supporting creative risks where possible, and helping teams build for the long term.”
