Believe or not, it’s been over 4 years since I last posted. A lot has happened since, but there’s no time to discuss that now.

Instead, let’s fast forward to now. In spite of what some people are saying, most devs I talk to these days are having difficulty finding success. Whether it’s how hard it is to get publisher funding (which leads some studios to have to close), or recent games performing worse than previous ones (like in my case with Wildkeepers Rising), the reality is that it’s rough out there, and it’s really difficult to make a living developing games. If you want an in-depth review of what’s going on in the industry, here’s the best one I’ve found.

But we’re indie developers. We’re survivors. We’re scrappy. We know no fear. We do these things not because they’re easy. If we get knocked down, we get up and say “we can do this all day.” Right?

The thing about taking a beating though, is that you should learn from your mistakes. It makes no sense to do the same thing twice, expecting different results. So, the question then becomes: in this current climate, what’s the best strategy for an indie developer to maximize the chances of financial success, or at least sustainability?

“You Need to Make Smaller Games”

Currently, this is the most popular piece of advice for indie devs.

There’s a lot to love about Smaller Games:

• They’re cheaper. Regardless of whether you’re self-funding, or looking for publisher money (most publishers don’t fund anything outside of the $200K-$500K range), less cost means your sales requirements also go down, so your chances of positive returns increase.
• They can be done more quickly. If you spend 5 years working on your game, by the time it releases it’s possible the audience has moved on, or your visuals don’t feel fresh anymore, or another game has beat you to market. Speed matters.
• You get more chances at success. It’s almost impossible to resuscitate a dead game after it’s released. By having new smaller games regularly, you get more “at-bats”: you get to roll de dice more often until you get that natural 20.
• You build a game catalog. Players might find your other games, boosting their sales whenever you release a new one. If you make small games quickly, you can have more games in your catalog.
• You can leverage the audience you built for previous games on the new ones. Assuming the genres are close enough, if you have a Discord community, or a newsletter, or even some Steam followers, you can point them to your new games, making discoverability easier.

If you’re starting your game development journey, then I wholeheartedly agree with making smaller games. The main reason, not stated above, is that at first you’re going to woefully underestimate how much work and how long it takes to release a game, so you’ll make it too big, it will be too hard and take forever and you’ll quit. Actually shipping something should be the absolute priority for new developers.

For more seasoned folks, the discussion is a lot trickier.

The Efficiency Argument

A lot of the benefits you get from smaller games can also be achieved by having a more efficient production process, i.e. making the same size of game, but with less resources in less time.

There’s really no downside to this. If you can generate the same results more efficiently, you should absolutely do THAT. Easier said than done, though. Oftentimes the line between “same results” and “my game just got smaller” is blurry. Some examples:

• You should focus your polish on the areas that players will notice and will increase sales (through better word of mouth, more favorable streamer coverage, higher review scores, etc). There is zero value in gold plating the texture of a wooden barrel that appears once in a corner that players rarely visit – that’s just wasted work. But if you neglect to polish important aspects in an effort to get the game done more quickly, then you’re not getting the “same results.”
• Using store assets can be a great way to save time and effort, especially for commodities like rocks, trees, or simple props. I’ve written about this before, and I’ve personally done this extensively, even for characters and animations. At the same time, your creative vision is limited by what’s available, and you may struggle to make the game visually coherent and to differentiate it. So you may not be getting the “same results.”
• Mostly locking the game’s design after a good prototyping phase saves a lot of time and effort because you don’t have to constantly rework your game as you iterate. On the other hand, if your game’s design is not really well understood, by curtailing iteration you might end up with an inferior product (stuck in the local maximum you found during prototyping), not with the “same results.”

I’m sure there are other approaches that walk that thin line between productivity improvements and making the game smaller. I’m also sure there are some that are pure productivity wins – like writing clean maintainable code (no overengineering) so coding velocity remains high throughout (can you tell I’m a programmer?)

One area that is controversial enough to discuss independently is AI usage. Using AI can help speed up certain parts of the development process, from research, to writing code and even art assets. There is a small learning curve, the models aren’t as competent as we’d like, there are ethical concerns with models being trained on copyrighted work and AI taking over jobs, it’s unclear what the IP situation is for AI assets, and there is a small but vocal segment of the industry and the player base that are strongly opposed to any AI use. After all of this though, AI is here to stay, and can be helpful and improve your productivity, if wielded appropriately.

The thing with relying on efficiency is that it’s an optimization problem. And like any good optimization problem, once you pick the low-hanging fruit, it becomes really difficult to make any progress. So, in practice, with no easy workflow improvements, you need to decide whether to make your game smaller (either intentionally or because your process improvements don’t yield the “same results”), and we’re back to step one.

Give Them What They Want

We’ve talked about the advantage of smaller games for developers. But what about players? How do they feel about smaller games?

When we talk about player expectations, I think it’s important to recognize that they’re not universal. At a minimum, each genre comes with different expectations. If you make a game that is meaningfully smaller (either in size or in perceived quality) than your competitors in the same genre, it’s likely that players will recognize this, and prefer the other titles. Imagine a 4X game with only a handful of units and 15 minute games – that probably wouldn’t work on Steam.

Speaking of the Steam audience, there is an argument that “[t]hey love deep games with lots of content. They like UIs that are complex and cluttered.” That trend may be changing, or at least diversifying. As younger players grow up, they don’t remember playing complex, difficult games as kids, like we did (I’m 52). They were playing Roblox, or mobile games where all friction has been smoothed out to maximize engagement (contrast that with spiky design). Their attention spans are shorter. They are used to hanging out online on Discord and spend their time browsing TikTok. Meanwhile, there is a 50-year old Generation-X dad whose favorite game growing up was the original Baldur’s Gate, and he’s playing Baldur’s Gate 3 now (a 117-hour game) or, God forbid, a Paradox game.

Genre and audience not only affect players’ willingness to accept smaller games, but also how much they’re willing to pay for them. The classic “dollar per hour of gameplay” metric is still commonly used in some genres but, more often than not, the price bar is arbitrarily set by a few market leaders, who then establish player expectations, and the rest of the games simply follow. So even if you expect to play a game for 20 hours, you can charge more if the game is Strategy than if it is a Survivors-like.

Lastly, it’s important to discuss a new phenomenon I’m going to call “janky by design“. Younger audiences seem to prefer buggy, glitchy games, to high fidelity and polished ones. Silly visuals and ragdoll physics result in funny organic moments that work well with a group of friends or in a short TikTok video. In this case, work spent polishing the game and fixing bugs is not just wasted, it’s actually counterproductive: you will sell fewer units.

At the end of the day, a complete analysis of “what players want” is beyond the scope of this essay. Let’s just agree that the audience is diverse, and there is some evidence that some younger players might be a good market for smaller jankier games.

I’ve Seen This Before

The modern push for smaller games among indie developers is not new. In fact, a very similar train of thought was common among mobile developers around a decade ago.

The reasons were clear. After a few years of meteoric growth, the mobile game market was starting to saturate. Spending years and millions of dollars on a game, just to find out the KPIs weren’t strong enough to pay for UA wasn’t good business. And nobody seemed able to predict what games were going to hit it big. Sound familiar?

Back in those days I was still working at Hothead Games. When I joined, the studio was riding a high after the success of the Big Win series. Attempts to create new IP failed until the release of Kill Shot (which incidentally was unexpectedly successful, reinforcing the idea that nobody can predict success.) The studio then tried to bet on shooters, at the time an under-explored niche on mobile, and a sequel to Kill Shot and games like Hero Hunters were the result. When that didn’t work Hothead pivoted again, this time to “making smaller games”.

The parameters were simple: form small teams of 3-5 people, and release a complete game prototype in three months on Google Play (which allowed “pre-release” games). The team would then evaluate KPIs (engagement, retention) as well as the cost of acquiring paid users. If the numbers were good, then development would scale to flesh out the game, eventually converting it into a live service (typical business model on mobile) that could be monetized for years. Even though these games are not available in the stores anymore, they can be found here.

I was there for a year, leading a team that released two game prototypes. I witnessed teammates work on nine other prototypes over a year. So, how many of these games were profitable? One, I think. Not enough, though. The studio went bankrupt in December, 2024. But hey, even Supercell hasn’t been able to release a new $1B game in the last 7 years.

For a while though, small games were all the rage on mobile stores. I’m talking about the rise of hyper-casual titles: super-simple games that could be understood at a glance and were very easy to develop, with primitive graphics and basic interactions. Publishers like Voodoo (at the time) would actually shop around for small developers, run quick tests to see if a game had very low UA costs and high retention and, in that case, spend big with razor-thin margins (those games monetized poorly) to scale the game, burning through the player base in a few weeks, after which the game would disappear into obscurity – but the profit was, hopefully, already made. I haven’t been following closely the evolution of the market, but my understanding is that it’s changed, moving toward slightly bigger games (hybrid-casual) and more sophisticated monetization. The problem with this formula, and the reason why it wasn’t viable for a studio like Hothead, is that it requires both access to tens or even hundreds of small games (because the chances of getting good KPIs are low) and deep expertise in paid advertising to succeed. From that point of view, building 11 smallish prototype games in a year didn’t unlock any new insights or markets, and in the end proved unsuccessful. Hothead was a very business-driven studio. We used to joke that everything was about “dollars and cents”. If there was a way to make money with this strategy, you can bet that we tried it.

“An Oracle Told Me”

Swen Vincke is the CEO at Larian Studios, makers of Baldur’s Gate 3. After winning Game of the Year at the 2023 Game Awards, Swen returned in 2024 to introduce that years winner. But before, he gave a famous speech:

Baldur’s Gate 3 needed three years just to hit Early Access, plus another three years until full release, growing the team from 150 people to over 400. Swen’s prediction for the 2024 and 2025 winners (Astro Bot and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33) was spot on – and both teams were significantly smaller than Larian’s.

To be clear, my goal is not to win Game Awards or compete with AAA games. But there is something about that speech that is grounding, that reminds us of why we love games and we wanted to make them in the first place. That gives us hope, even after a failure.

Games, Games Everywhere

One more point to make. Look at this chart showing games released on Steam over the last 10 years:

When I started Mech Armada in early 2020 and analyzed the games that came out in 2019, the data suggested the amount of games released every year had peaked. Boy was I wrong.

Tools have matured and keep getting better every day. Asset stores make it easier and cheaper than ever to make games with small teams. The massive waves of layoffs across the industry have pushed many developers to start their own micro-studios. AI is accelerating all of this even more. I’m sure there are many other reasons that explain this constant increase.

Yet, one of the main causes why indie devs are struggling to find an audience is because there are too many games. Like it or not, Steam’s capacity to show games is a limited resource, so the more games there are, the smaller a piece you get. Other stores (consoles, Epic) are much worse in terms of discoverability in the face of an increasing number of games.

This reminds me of the prisoner’s dilemma, but generalized to all developers. It goes like this:

1. If we all release smaller games, we flood the market with low quality product, and players buy fewer games. Everybody makes a bit of money, but not much.
2. If we all release bigger, higher quality games, there will be less product, so it will feel more valuable (supply and demand) and as the games are better, players prefer them over other forms of entertainment. We all make more money than in scenario 1.
3. If everybody releases bigger games, and I release lots of smaller games, the market is still very healthy, and my many games get lots of exposure, so I make even more money than in scenario 2.
4. If everybody releases smaller games, but I release a big game, the market functions like in scenario 1, but I only have one game (which is buried in the deluge) so I end up worse off.

If you plot it as a diagram, it’s always in my best interest to release smaller games, regardless of whatever everyone else is doing. But if everybody does that, we all end up worse off than if we all make fewer, higher quality games. This is also known as a collective action problem. I think we all know how this ends.

In Conclusion

The question “should I make smaller games” has literally kept me up at night for the last few days. That’s why I needed to put all of this in writing.

I won’t have a definite conclusion here. This topic is way too complex for that. My goal was to make you think about your own circumstances, which I’m sure are different from mine. So the rest of this section is purely subjective.

I’ve been resisting the idea of making smaller games. Part of it is my experience at Hothead and how that approach face-planted both with fast-follows and with minimal prototypes. Part of it is the knowledge I can’t make a six month game that is nearly as good as a two year game (I find it funny that “smaller games” is also rapidly shrinking from two years, like Thronefall, to six months, and now even to three months). Part of it is the feeling that contributing to the avalanche of mediocre games wouldn’t be helping anybody (players, other devs). Part of it is the effect that making a game has on my mental health: while the game is taking shape, it’s exciting, almost exhilarating – though obviously commercial failures are super tough – and I don’t think I’d get the same high if I’m just making the smallest game possible to ship it in a hurry and hope for the best. And part of me is realizing that I don’t understand how to make games for the younger audiences: I don’t know how to make something janky but charming.

I don’t think the only way to be successful is to go full mercenary and flood the market with MVPs. In fact, in the best case scenario, all you’re getting is a slightly higher chance to succeed. Success is still really tough and remember, nobody knows anything. If the price for that slightly higher chance is to lose a piece of my soul…I don’t think I’m ready for it. And if making another game of the same size as Mech Armada or Wildkeepers Rising is not viable for me, then maybe it’s time to put down the controller and let the new generations figure out this puzzle.