Independents' pay

With publishers dwindling and funding drying up, is your next favourite indie production at risk of dying on the vine?

When Humble Games laid off 36 employees this July, amid the general sense of unease and distaste was something more specific: déjà vu. Humble's downsizing came just days after the launch of its latest game, Bo: Path Of The Teal Lotus, a situation painfully reminiscent of Embracer's closure of Versus Evil late last year, which left Broken Roads developer Drop Bear Bytes without a publisher weeks before its planned release. Meanwhile, Humble owner Ziff Davis labelling the move as "restructuring" brought to mind the fate of the Take Two-owned Private Division, which remains in flux after most of its employees were laid off in April.

It hasn't been an especially good few months for indie game publishing, then.

But is the situation completely - as Mike Rose, founder of publisher No More Robots, put it during an interview with Game Developer "fucked"? One developer likely to back that assessment is Bo developer Squid Shock Studios. The Humble situation has been disastrous for the studio, co-founder Chris Stair tells us. Before the restructuring, he was in talks with the publisher about sourcing extra funding to support the game over the post-launch period. Now, funds are "dwindling fast", leaving Squid Shock to turn to Patreon to seek direct support from its audience (you can pledge a monthly amount, from £1 upwards, at patreon.​com/squids-hock). "I wanted to have more control over the financial support of the studio, rather than relying on the publisher," Stair explains.

Meanwhile, Squid Shock been left unable to release patches for Bo's console versions, a pipeline that was handled by its publisher. And while Humble has put an interim team in place, Stair is not optimistic about the outcome.

"Our trust level is absolute below zero with these new people. I have no idea who they are, I have no idea what they're doing."

It's a bitter outcome for a relationship that, before July, had been mostly positive.