Small wonders

How the Tiny Teams festival gives solo devs and micro studios their moment in the sun

How does a lone developer get their game noticed in a saturated marketplace? For many, any offer of a leg up is welcome. Enter the Tiny Teams Steam festival, which ran for its third consecutive year in August, and provides just that. Organised by the indie publishing arm of the Yogscast streaming network, it showcases games created by individuals and micro-studios (defined here as a core team of five or fewer). And it's becoming increasingly attractive for those who need a boost. This year, nearly 1,000 games were submitted for consideration, over four times last year's tally, which means that selecting which titles to include has become a lot of work for Tiny Teams founder Alex Turner. "We need to figure out a way to make it more manageable from our side," he says, "without me having to sit and play games for 16 hours."

He can take comfort, at least, in seeing the festival benefit Yogscast as much as its featured developers - which was always the intention. The concept emerged in response to COVID-19, when the publisher was still in its infancy. "We were trying to figure out ways that we can get people to know about us a bit more," Turner explains. Having experienced the draw of Steam festivals such as Ludo-NarraCon, and realising that in-person events may be problematic, it made sense to try something similar, and while Turner and his colleagues had no particular theme in mind, the pieces soon fell into place. "We realised that basically all the teams we'd worked with were either a solo developer or there were two or three of them at most," Turner says. "There were indie festivals around, but 'indie' felt like such a nebulous term, encompassing solo devs but also studios of 40 people that had quite a lot of money." The idea of a tiny team thus refocused attention on genuinely small-scale games, and Valve got on board. "For some reason they let us do it, which was quite a surprise," Turner says.