It's never been a harder time to make games, get funding for games, or release games, particularly in the indie scene. The way the market has changed has significantly altered what titles get made, and how they're packaged for general audiences.
This is all against a backdrop of increased competition: something Brandon Sheffield, director of Necrosoft Games, knows all too well, having delayed his team's long-in-development RPG Demonschool just weeks before launch to avoid releasing alongside the GTA 6 of indie, Hollow Knight: Silksong.
Demonschool sees players assume the role of Faye, a university student attempting to navigate school life on an unusual island while battling mysterious forces in both the real and demon worlds. It blends social features with a grid-based combat system that the team has incubated for a number of years with support from publisher Ysbryd Games.
The game features a mix of both Eastern and Western inspirations, from the obvious (like Atlus's Shin Megami Tensei) to the more obscure (like the tactical RPG series Black/Matrix and Italian giallo cinema). The gameplay blends seamlessly into the crafted worlds, with combat taking place in the same environments players explore in both dungeons and daily life, and its 20th-century setting gives it a unique sense of place.
It's an ambitious title, one that's been gestating for over five years as the attention-to-detail and scope have expanded, making it one of the more-anticipated indie games for the final months of 2025.
The long development period means that, as Sheffield admitted in a recent conversation with Aftermath, the game needs to sell 100,000 units to break even – which at least partly explains the last-minute move out of the path of Silksong.
“I was on the side of staying, and the publisher was on the side of delaying. Ultimately, I think they were right”
Sheffield says that although the team was honest at the time in stating it was “not our choice” to delay the game, he admits it was the correct decision.
“We basically had a conversation between the publisher and I deciding if we were to delay,” Sheffield recalls. “I was on the side of staying, and the publisher was on the side of delaying. Ultimately, I think they were right.
“We've seen when talking to platforms and people like Simon Carless, who tracks data, Silksong really did take over. I mean, you would've seen it too, stores went down, it wouldn't have been a great time [to release the game]. Ultimately, I think it was the right choice to delay, and I'm lucky that got to be a conversation rather than getting a demand.”
The team is taking advantage of the delay. “There were some endings that we were going to patch in later that are going to be there now, but also we were able to add a more visible polish to it than before – like how when you reach the end of a relationship you used to get a small kiss graphic, but now the graphic fills the screen. And there's other stuff, too.”
But it's also a delay borne from necessity, not desire, and shows just how difficult it is releasing an indie game in the current market.
With growing competition on Steam and elsewhere as tools become accessible and storefronts on console and PC more inviting, it takes much more to stand out.
“If you really want to make a mark and actually get your money back, you have to at least have the chance of being the ‘Indie Game of the Week', and if you can't make that happen, then you have a 0% chance of it. And there was a 0% chance that was going to happen for us with Silksong.
“We wound up delaying two and a half months because, well, the next week you're too close to Silent Hill. After that, it's October, a busy month before you talk about Final Fantasy Tactics. I'd already talked to [people at Supergiant Games], so I knew to avoid Hades.”
15 minutes of fame
The abundance of games releases is well-known by this point: over 18,000 titles released on Steam in 2024, the clear majority of which were independent games. Of that, nearly half have fewer than ten reviews, suggesting sales in the hundreds or fewer.
Even for those titles with stronger sales, the growth in development times, teams, scale, and the expectations of audiences mean that games need even higher sales just to make back the development cost, before any profit. A huge majority of the sales for indies also come in that crucial initial launch period, when the game has a chance of reaching the front page of digital stores – making pre-release and launch momentum crucial.
It doesn't mean you can't sell more copies of your game after the opening week, but without a strong opening, no one will keep talking about it and fuel the longer tail and post-launch sales. It's only more important for a single-player story-driven title like Demonschool. Simply put, you need to be the centre of attention.
“If you miss out on your chance to be the centre of attention, your 15 minutes of fame, it's very hard,” says Sheffield. “If you're a live-service game, you have multiple chances to possibly turn things around, but if you're a single-player game, it's one and done. Your launch is very big, and if you don't succeed right away, the likelihood of getting picked up later is so slim.”
It shows how the industry has shifted, something Sheffield is all too familiar with. A veteran of more than two decades in the games industry, he's been at the forefront of many of the ways in which audiences and the publisher–developer relationship have changed.
“If you miss out on your chance to be the centre of attention, your 15 minutes of fame, it's very hard”
He has worked as a consultant for both major and indie games, while leading Necrosoft through the development of Hyper Gunsport, Gunhouse, Oh Deer, and Demonschool, and has also worked in media with the likes of Gamasutra and Game Developer. He has witnessed how funding for new games has become harder than ever to obtain, despite the industry's scale.
When Demonschool was initially looking for funding, for example, the team was able to secure support after impressing with an early demo and development plan, which at the time weren't necessarily a requirement from many indie publishers.
Today, they are practically essential. Even then, support is far from guaranteed.
“It would be so much harder [for Demonschool to get funding today],” Sheffield admits. “I think it's one of the hardest times I've ever seen for getting funding. We had a demo, which would give us a higher chance right now, but I feel like publishers seeking indie games want a full vertical slice now. Before you could do a paper pitch, and there's still some places that will accept them, but by and large, you need to have already spent quite a lot of money.
“Beyond that there's leveraging relationships, where if you know each other you can probably get something, but that's not easy on new developers. I go to all the trade shows, I pitch companies, and it's very rare for me to not know a person at this company that I'm pitching. That's a very privileged position to be in.
“I can't imagine if I were just breaking in, what it would be like if I was trying to pitch from nothing. It seems really tough. Everyone, everyone is looking for the next Vampire Survivors or Balatro, and those only exist because they could get away grinding by themselves.
“The industry has changed a lot, and the consumer landscape has changed a lot. I think the one thing that's good for us is not that many games have entered our exact space in the interim. Maybe there's a good reason for that! But it at least means that the audience that's looking for our game is still looking for our game.”
Fragmented media
The media has changed, too, making it harder to find an audience. We spoke to Sheffield at Tokyo Game Show, a market where traditional media maintains a strong hold on the dissemination of information and influencing audiences, even in an overwhelmingly online world.
Magazines like Famitsu still remain strong in Japan, even if physical sales have declined. Influencers are growing in prominence in the country, but their status is more akin to that of “talents” in the broadcast sphere, rather than direct dictators of what games to buy.
They may take part in direct brand collaborations, as seen with Hikakin joining others in promotions for the recent movie adaptation of Exit 8, but otherwise, they provide a more reactionary function, strictly focused on entertainment. Content is centred around ongoing live-service titles like Valorant or Minecraft, rather than the latest hits. This means getting featured in a magazine or on a website like 4Gamer (as Demonschool was) is still crucial for getting your name out there – in Japan, at least.
“I think criticism is really important, and people who are trained in criticism can do that better than people who are not”
Internationally, we've seen almost all major physical print magazines discontinued, sites laying off employees or shutting down, and the weight of influence shifting towards influencers and TikTok.
Compared with the days when even a small preview in a physical magazine – never mind a major feature – could lead to discussion in playgrounds and fan circles for months, is the games media now even necessary to bring awareness to new releases?
While Sheffield hopes the strength of the media can return to its “glory days,” there's still a recognition that the traditional landscape holds both direct and indirect influence in shaping the views of the industry even now.
“I personally would love for things to go back to the press being the most important thing, because I think criticism is really important, and people who are trained in criticism can do that better than people who are not. I think that press still has a place because to some extent influencers and streamers will see interesting games from press stories and share them, because things being big in the press can still have some meaning, although it's obviously gotten much more fractured.
“It's a lot more random now. A friend of mine had a game that just from screenshots and mockups got picked up by a wholesome streamer with a bunch of followers on TikTok and got 4 million likes. From that they got a publishing deal and a 90-degree trajectory of wishlists just because one person thought it was a big deal.
“Then, because one big person thought it was important, the next tier of creators, so to speak, would talk about it, so you can get into a zeitgeist that way. If you don't, you can just be struggling and hustling away, and every time your game comes up, people will be like, ‘Oh, I've never heard of this.'”
Demonschool is set to launch in what is perhaps the hardest era for releasing games ever. It's also difficult to imagine things will get easier, looking at an industry where layoffs remain the dominant headline.
Getting one game out of the door is hard enough, but now Necrosoft has to try to get more funding for development on another game, at a time when publishers would rather keep their money close to their chest.
“You've always got to be shifting with the environment, while also maintaining your ideals and company morals and things like that,” Sheffield explained as we began to conclude our conversation.
“That can be difficult and complicated, but we're certainly trying. We've survived by the skin of our teeth basically our whole existence. You've got to figure out where money's coming from and take whatever money you can without going, ‘Oh, and now we're going to use Gen AI on everything'
“That's the struggle for me. There are plenty of people that want to give you money to do something that will make you feel like a terrible person. Thing is, we want to at least maintain our trajectory as a company that wants to be good to the world.
“We spend too much time trying to cater to every audience, when having something with a drive or specificity […] has a better chance of finding someone who will espouse its purpose to others”
He continued: “We want and need money, but it isn't the end goal. Money is a means to an end, a vehicle that we have to engage with in order to get to the goal of creating something interesting. Everyone's got to shift, and I couldn't give anyone any specific advice about that, because everyone is in their own situation and a lot of my friends' studios have shut down.
“I hope more people in the industry will find ways to make games that are a little weird or a little different and don't have all the edges sanded off. I think we spend too much time trying to cater to every audience, when having something with more of a drive or specificity is not only more interesting, I think it also has a better chance of finding someone who will then espouse its purpose to others. We could all be a little weirder.”
