Studios Keep Laying Off Devs. I Think That's How We Get the Next Great Indie Games.

I'll say this first, I really feel bad for devs right now. It feels like every few months another studio is cutting people and every few months another big game drops something that makes you go who asked for this. On the pod we got into how gaming became more about profit than passion and it's because the people making the calls are in suits. They've never touched a controller in their life. Which is why you keep seeing the same wrong read on what players want across a bunch of different games.

However I'm not sad about where this is going. I'm actually excited.

What the devs at the panel said

I was at a panel at Georgia State recently for gaming and esports and the developers up there were real professionals, people from actual studios. One of the things they said stuck with me. A lot of the big AAA studios you know today exist because a group of high level devs left an old studio, made their own and it turned into a big name. That's how it's always worked.

Now look at what's happening. Studios are going on the offense and just dropping people, layoffs all over the place. And what we're going to see from that is a lot of great indie studios and passion projects coming out of the woodwork. That's the part I'm really interested in.

Why this time is different

Back then the issue was you didn't have the funding for super high quality. You could make a game but it probably wasn't at the quality you wanted to deliver it at. The panel started talking about Unreal Engine and what it lets people do now and I was like damn, they're right. You can probably leave a high end studio and make a video game with decent quality with just a couple people. You still need the bread for it, music, graphics, assets, all of that, I'm not going to act like it's free. But the gap is way smaller than it used to be.

And we already have the proof. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came out of a team of around 30 to 40 people in house and it shipped 3.3 million units in about a month according to the studio, then went on to win Game of the Year at The Game Awards. That's a small team by today's standards competing with studios that have thousands of people. The reason those small teams work is they don't have all these divisions and branches to get approval from. The only people they're answering to is the community, not investors. And smaller teams usually means more room for different kinds of people to build, which is something I already wrote about in why diversity in game development matters.

The games that make me happy

The indie games I keep coming back to are the ones like Chained Together and Peak. Peak sold over 5 million copies in under a month according to Aggro Crab, which is crazy for a game about climbing a mountain with your friends. Those two games make me happy and I'll tell you why. They're built for two or more streamers playing one game together and I just like seeing that. I don't think streaming and gaming are integrated as much as I want them to be and those games have me excited about where gaming is going.

And I'm not talking ten years from now. I'm saying two to three years.

Technology is not a tree

I've been saying this for a while. Two or three years ago I was sitting on a script and the whole premise of it was that technology doesn't need years to double and quadruple. A tree might need two, three, five years to get tall and strong. Technology needs about six months. You get a new GPU every year, a new iPhone every year, new PC parts every year. It's forever going. I got into that same idea in the approaching new age of gaming and technology.

So when you put those two things together, a bunch of talented devs who just got cut loose and tools that keep getting better every six months, I think we're about to see a lot of passion projects that look and play like they came from a big studio.

If you're a studio that keeps making the wrong read because the people at the top don't play games, the people you let go might be the ones who end up making what players actually wanted.

So I'm asking you, what's the last indie game that hit harder for you than a AAA release, and who do you think is about to come out of these layoffs with something special? Drop it in the CXM Discord.