Opening The Gates

Meet Kowloon Nights, a new development fund with the future of videogames in its sights.

- Alex Wiltshire

The indie revolution is over. The gates have swung open for solo developers and small studios: Steam, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft’s storefronts splash their games across their front pages and parade them on their conference stages. With these developers has come a new breadth of story, setting, style and themes, heralding the beginning of a new era. But with new eras come new challenges.

“The game industry is in a wild state of fragmentation,” says Teddy Dief, who lead the development of Hyper Light Drifter. “Game makers have more and more options for platforms, audiences and technology, creating new subsets of our audience such as VR, streamer-targeted designs, and new experiments in genre and narrative.” For Dief, that means shouldering new risk, and seeking out huge new creative opportunities.

“We’re definitely past the golden age of ‘closed’ Steam and early Kickstarter,” says Will Dubé, who founded Thunder Lotus in 2014 to Kickstart hand-drawn Norse action game Jotun. “It used to be hard to publish a game, but now it’s hard to capture an audience. The current challenge is standing out in an oversaturated market.”

For Counterpoint, maker of CCG strategy game Duelyst, the latest challenge is about finding the talent it needs to develop its ideas, and for Scavengers Studio, which is making free-to-play battle-royale game Darwin Project, being small and full of ideas presents all kinds of problems when it comes to running a live multiplayer game.