The New Money Behind Indie Games

In less than two weeks, three notable game developers have launched publishing businesses.

On August 25, Journey and Sky: Children of the Light developer thatgamecompany unveiled thatgamepublisher, a full-service label focused on what it calls “emotionally ambitious” games. A week later, PEAK co-developer Aggro Crab launched Aggro Crab Presents. Days later, Escape from Tarkov developer Battlestate Games announced Battlestate Games Publishing, specifically looking for the sort of hardcore niche projects other publishers might consider too risky.

They aren’t the first to take this path. After the runaway success of Among Us, Innersloth launched its game fund, Outersloth, in 2024. Vampire Survivors studio poncle opened a publishing label the same year. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Content Warning developer Landfall now operates Evil Landfall (Landfall also co-developed PEAK with Aggro Crab). Phasmophobia developer Kinetic Games launched Kinetic Publishing earlier this year, while Pocketpair created Pocketpair Publishing after Palworld.

Not all models are alike. For instance, Outersloth and Evil Landfall don’t act as conventional publishers for the outside projects they fund. But the pattern is there: some of the biggest independent winners of the past few years are taking the cash generated by their own hits and deploying it into other people’s games.

The idea itself isn’t new. Team17’s pitch in 2013 was remarkably similar: it had a community of millions, digital publishing expertise, and actual game development experience. Coffee Stain followed a similar path after Goat Simulator, launching a publishing arm in 2017 that promised developers the sort of deals it would have wanted to sign itself.

The real story is that so many developers are doing it at the same time. This comes down to two simple facts: money has become scarce for most developers and abundant for a lucky few.

The New Financiers

Game funding has changed fast. Outside money has dried up, publishers have become more cautious, and developers are expected to get further on their own before anyone steps in. At the same time, a handful of indie studios have made so much money from breakout hits that they can now fund other developers themselves.

First, the easy money is gone. The venture boom of 2020–2022 is over. Gaming startup investment peaked at $12.5B before falling below $2.5B by 2024. While venture capital has rebounded, the money is flowing toward AI companies, not game studios. On the other hand, publishers increasingly want to see a substantial prototype, traction, wishlists, or an existing community before committing — and there are fewer publishers left to ask. Humble Games laid off its entire staff in 2024, and Annapurna Interactive’s team walked out the same year.

Second, the biggest indie winners have become very big indeed. The top end of the independent market has increasingly concentrated around a relatively small number of breakout games, creating fortunes inside studios with often modest headcounts. Phasmophobia has sold more than 27M copies; Palworld has already broken 30M units. In gross revenue, we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Aggro Crab is unusually blunt about this in its publishing pitch: after the success of PEAK, it has “some spare cash lying around.”

Third, it’s become easier to put that money to work. Becoming a publisher no longer means building a large organization around every support function in-house. For a Steam-first game, much of the work around QA, localization, porting, PR, and marketing can be brought in as needed. A studio can provide the money, advice, and introductions while leaving much of the actual publishing operation with the developer. Outersloth says this outright: it wants to fund games, not publish them. Evil Landfall takes a similar approach.

All in all, there are more developers looking for money, a handful of winners with plenty of it, and fewer barriers stopping those winners from becoming financiers.

What the Newcomers Can Offer

The more interesting question is what happens once the newcomers start writing checks. Broadly speaking, these new developer-publishers aren’t bringing capabilities that the market has never seen before. Devolver can market an indie game, Team17 understands Steam, Kepler can fund unusual projects, and specialist publishers already build audiences around particular genres.

However, these newcomers have lower overhead, tiny slates, and another successful business paying the bills. That can change the kinds of risks they are willing to take, the terms they can offer, and how closely their interests line up with the developers they back.

The biggest difference may be incentives. For most of this cohort, publishing is still a side business rather than the thing keeping the company alive. It is also balance-sheet money rather than fund money: no limited partners and no clock forcing capital out the door or demanding it back on schedule. Outersloth is explicit about this: because Among Us pays Innersloth’s salaries, the fund can afford to be less rigid about what it backs. Aggro Crab plans to sign only one or two games a year, generally with modest budgets, and has publicly pushed back against deal structures where the publisher takes all revenue until recoup.

Their specialization is unusually credible. Battlestate’s pitch is the clearest example. Few companies can credibly claim to understand hardcore PC players better than the studio behind Escape from Tarkov, and Battlestate is specifically looking for games that other publishers might see as too niche or uncompromising. Thatgamepublisher, on the other hand, uses its long history with Journey and Sky: Children of the Light as a filter for the kinds of emotionally driven games it wants to support. The act of publishing a game is easy; getting players to notice is not. As discovery becomes increasingly difficult, a publisher that already has the right players listening may have something more valuable than a larger but less focused publisher.

Finally, they all make some version of the “we’ve been in your shoes” pitch. Kinetic says it wants to give developers the kind of help Daniel Knight would have wanted when he was launching Phasmophobia on his own. Evil Landfall emphasizes that developers should keep control of both the game and the business around it. Outersloth has gone as far as publishing its standard funding contract in the hope of pushing the wider industry toward friendlier terms.

Still, we have to take it with a grain of salt. These companies were recently on the other side of the table, but difficult conversations around scope, delays, and quality don’t disappear because both sides are developers. Friendly terms and shared experience may get the best teams through the door; whether these newcomers can turn those teams into successful games is what they have to prove.

Having a Hit Doesn’t Make You a Great Publisher

We know these studios because they produced exceptional games. That doesn’t mean they are exceptional capital allocators, and the bets are already on the table. Kinetic revealed five games in August, Aggro Crab signed two, and Pocketpair has been shipping since 2025. The new publishers still need to prove that they provide meaningful value beyond writing a check.

First, they need to prove that their success is transferable. Aggro Crab’s audience loves Aggro Crab games; will it reliably buy games made by other studios? Battlestate understands Tarkov players, but does that insight translate into selecting the next hardcore hit? A studio’s intuition about why its own game worked may turn out to be great taste, or simply after-the-fact reasoning around an outlier. The early evidence cuts both ways. Poncle launched its label in late 2024, published Kill the Brickman and Berserk or Die, and by April 2026 had refocused on Vampire Survivors and new IP of its own. Evil Landfall points the other way: it struck gold with Peak, R.E.P.O. and How to Fish.

Second, some of their current advantages may disappear if they grow. Small slates, low overhead, founder involvement, and a successful game paying the bills are exactly what lets these publishers be flexible today. However, if their publishing businesses start hiring larger teams and taking on more projects — or if their primary cash source wanes — they will eventually need those projects to cover their own costs. At that point, the economics may start looking a lot more like the incumbent publishers they currently distinguish themselves from.

Mostly, this is small money. Aggro Crab is looking below $500,000. Kinetic and Evil Landfall are looking at tickets of up to roughly $1M per game. Meanwhile, Outersloth has put roughly $19M to work across two dozen projects. Thatgamepublisher is the outlier, saying it will consider teams with AA-level budgets, but it hasn’t disclosed what it is actually writing. All in all, the cohort plausibly deploys $30–50M annually: pretty much the budget of a single AA production. Also, the $2–$20M budget range remains difficult.

Developer-publishers aren’t the only new money funding games. Project financing is making a broader comeback: in May, Griffin Gaming Partners launched a $100M fund specifically for financing indie games, offering project-level deals rather than taking equity.

More sources of risk capital are ultimately good news for developers and players alike. These companies are deploying relatively small sums in the context of the broader games industry, and will likely remain small by design. But it was relatively small sums that produced Among Us, Phasmophobia, PEAK, and many of the other hits that put them in a position to invest in the first place.

The winners of the last indie cycle are now helping decide which games get a shot at the next one. If that means a few more strange, niche, or otherwise hard-to-fund games get made, the trend will matter even if none of these companies ever grow into a publishing giant.

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In Other News

Funding and M&A:

• GenAI firm Tripo raises $445M two months after Series A3 round
• Pocket Worlds acquires Hotel Hideaway and expands social-world portfolio to 80M users
• US-based classic games IP holder and publisher Piko Interactive has acquired Thailand-based indie games developer and publisher 7 Raven Studios for an undisclosed sum
• UK-based game modding platform Nexus Mods, owned by Denmark-based gaming holding Chosen since Jun’25, has acquired SteamDB
• LEGO Digital Play acquires Space Ape spinout Offroad Games
• UK-based sports movement-intelligence platform Hitai has acquired the technology and intellectual property of UK-based fitness gaming developer Quell for an undisclosed sum

Business & Product:

• Frontier Developments FY26 adjusted operating profit jumps 62% to £21.4M
• Chinese games market surpasses $50B for the first time in 2025
• ARM unveils AI-native mobile platform for agentic AI and graphics
• Keywords Studios combines multiple marketing businesses into global creative agency FreeAnimal
• Sega reports $31.6M net loss during FY26, cancels ‘Super Game’ project amid strategic pivot

Miscellaneous:

• Mark Cerny and Geoff Keighley launch Nova Games Foundation to fund young designers
• YouTube gaming creators “command 23% higher deal rates than Twitch”
• UK launches Creative Trade Forum to boost global growth
• Indie Stars competition entries now open for Game Republic New Horizons
• Epic Games launches Epic Parties to give players a cross-ecosystem voice chat

Content Worth Consuming

“We Probably Need a Few More Expedition 33s to Just Prove Them Wrong” — the Maker of Valor Mortis on Why Publishers Should Have Faith in AA (gamesindustry.biz): “Over the past 12 years, Polish studio One More Level has carved out a niche in the world of AA games with projects whose production values often approach those of AAA titles. Its eye-catching 2020 cyberpunk action platformer Ghostrunner launched to critical acclaim and commercial success, selling 5.6 million units according to Video Game Insights estimates, and it was followed by a sequel in 2023.”

CD Projekt Red: If you want a cost-driven development, you cannot make The Witcher 4 (The Game Business): “We speak to CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michal Nowakowski about the switch to making multiple games, returning to The Witcher 3, why it released Cyberpunk 2077 too early, the fate of video game consoles, TV adaptations, The Witcher 4 and a whole lot more.”

How a Viral Animation Turned Into a Sword-Fighting Dinosaur Game with Jean Nguyen (The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook): “Adam Orth chats with Jean Nguyen, the creator behind the viral hit Dinoblade. Together they discuss his early work in games through animation; the story of his viral animation featuring a Spinosaurus with a sword; deciding to expand on the concept and make it a full game; learning game development through self-study thanks to online sources like YouTube; and how to create believable sword-wielding dinosaurs.”

Game PR in the Age of AI: What Actually Works? (GameMakers): “Ask ChatGPT for the best mobile puzzle game and it does not say Candy Crush. It says Monument Valley, a game from 2014 that is not on any top grossing chart. Kalie Moore has spent the last year working out why, and this is the version a game studio can act on. I keep getting the same question from studios: how do you get found now that players ask an AI instead of searching. So I asked someone who does it for a living. Kalie Moore runs High Vibe PR, a boutique PR agency for gaming, AI and frontier tech companies, with offices in the USA, Europe and Asia.”

Find the Cat 2: The Sequel to a Monster Hit. Built to show MORE Ads (two & a half gamers): “ Join the hosts, Matej Lancaric, Felix Braberg, and Jakub Remiar as they analyze the mobile game Find the Cat 2. The hosts discuss the game’s design, monetization strategies, and user acquisition metrics while playfully engaging with the game’s mechanics.“

Sucker Punch’s Chris Zimmerman on the Attention Barrier, Finding the Spark and the Arrogance of Starting Things (pocketgamer.biz): “Sucker Punch was founded in October 1997 by six Microsoft alumni with no publisher, no engine and no game. Twenty-nine years later it is a PlayStation Studios team of around 160 people whose last two releases, Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yōtei, are among Sony’s biggest first-party properties. During SLICE 2026 in Seattle, where we hosted the Big Indie Pitch, we caught up with speaker Chris Zimmerman, co-founder and studio head emeritus at Sucker Punch.“

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