No More Robots founder Mike Rose explains how cynicism can ensure survival and offers indie devs some pitching advice.
No More Robots, the UK-based indie publisher founded by Mike Rose, has found plenty of success over the years. Since forming in 2017, the company has brought a litany of titles to market including Not Tonight, Yes, Your Grace, Hypnospace Outlaw, Let's Build a Zoo, Spirittea, and Descenders.
The latter was the first project signed by the publisher and remains one of its most successful, attracting a feverishly loyal community after filling a gap in the extreme sports market when it launched in 2018. Now, it's finally getting a sequel in Descenders Next, which aims to be the definitive downhill racer.
For No More Robots and founder Rose, the reveal of Descenders Next represents something of a milestone moment. A chance to reflect on how much has changed since the publisher took its first steps seven years ago. How has the business evolved since then? Well, Rose claims it's pretty much "fucked."
It's a rather blunt appraisal, but with layoffs carving through the industry while both studios and publishers drop like flies, you might struggle to find anybody who'd argue. Rose explains there are some top level reasons for the downturn. The pandemic sales boom resulting from lockdowns. The subsequent over-investments and growth projections that never came good. The economic impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The rampant M&A wave that saw numerous studios and publishers swallowed by yawning conglomerates. The misguided belief that IPOs somehow represent the promised land.
Rose suggests it's a recipe that can only lead to one thing: a market implosion. But is there anything publishers can do to survive? Perhaps.
For starters, he says it's time to admit that platform holders are no longer serving the interests of smaller publishers. "The problem with the new situation is that everything that I did when No More Robots started—you know, getting cheeky [Xbox Game Pass] deals and making it onto the Stream front page—isn't available any more," he says. "None of that is available anymore. When the Steam Summer Sale happens, it's absolutely triple-A all the way down that have paid for those slots. It used to be the Summer Sale would make us a year of burn rate, and now it's a nice little spike."
Rose says indies have been sidelined on Steam after Microsoft, Sony, EA and other major players chose to bring titles that might previously have been console exclusives onto PC. "Steam is making more money," he says, "but like 50 percent of that revenue is being generated by 1 percent of the games."
Rose feels part of the solution is to seriously mitigate the risks you're taking on as a publisher. Consider the long-term without fixating on exponential growth. He says more companies need to accept that success in video games doesn't need to be synonymous with rapid expansion and chart-topping hits, but rather pragmatic survival.
"After 2022 when everything seemed fucked, we just stopped signing things," he explains. "For a long time we just stopped signing things because I was like 'this is a death cycle.' What we need to do is get better at making more money out of the back-catalogue we've got. And we have done that. In the last two years we've got into an amazing cycle, where as cynical as it sounds, we've squeezed every penny out of the games we've got.
"So the games we had already are making more money than before because we had a big focus on that. But earlier this year, when everyone started to close down, I started to realize that if we keep doing that eventually it's not going to go well. If we have no games, then what happens? Our new plan essentially is to sign a bunch of new stuff [...] but they're all very cheap and quick, out-of-the-door projects."
Rose explains those projects were signed on the basis they'll take months, not years, to develop. It also means shorter timeframes between reveal and release, perhaps giving them a greater chance of taking root in the consumer consciousness. "I've signed five new things in the last few months and the plan is they are all going to come out within the next year, and the hope is they'll all recoup very quickly," he adds. "Then if a couple of them really pop off, then we'll say cool 'let's stick that on Switch or see if Game Pass wants in.'"
It's an approach that might not deliver a sales "explosion," but that's precisely the point. In signing lower risk projects, No More Robots doesn't need to swing for a home run each time it goes to bat.
If you're thinking this all sounds a little pessimistic, Rose is right there with you. Maybe, though, there's room for a little more cynicism if it can help save an industry that so often tries to run before it can walk. "I quite often feel like I'm this old, whiney, white man," he says. "That's what I think people see me as—and I am. But with good fucking reason. Last year, a number of press sites reached out like 'Hi Mike, we're doing our end of year roundup and seeing what publishers thing is going to happen in 2024. We're hearing lots of positive things.'
"I emailed back saying 'I don't know who you're hearing that from but they're unbelievably wrong. Next year is going to be worse. There's nothing to say otherwise, and now obviously we've seen how this year is going. People saying 'survive to 2025' makes me sad because they think it's going to be better. I understand what the whole point of optimism is, and maybe I'm going to cut years off my life being a pessimist, but I also have a sustainable business because of my pessimism."
Rose says there have been multiple points when No More Robots could have gone crazy. People were telling him to hire "fucking loads of people" after the publisher delivered some hits. But he was sure the good times wouldn't last, and suggests he would have been a "fucking idiot" to believe No More Robots had somehow become invincible. Success isn't permanent. It's a drum he keeps banging, but it has become key to No More Robots' survival.
Where does this leave developers? Rose says there are currently two types of games you can pitch publishers: "either cheap as fuck or expensive as hell." Anything in the middle is getting knocked back. "There are publishers who will take low risk, cheap games, like ourselves," he continues. "But there are publishers. Companies like Devolver for example—I don't know what numbers they're looking for, but it's going to be ridiculous numbers. [...] If they sign like a middling game for $400,000 or something, it looks weak. It looks like they're signing a small game. But $400,000 is too much for me."
Rose still needs to connect with a pitch on a personal level, but explains it's vital that developers can understand and effectively communicate their needs. "Sometimes they're asking for too little money. They'll say 'it'll take X amount of time but it's only going to cost this because we'll live cheap,'" he says.
He feels another myth that traps developers is the notion that more time in development will equal more sales. "It's not true. It's just not true. And if anything, now you're seeing—especially on the visual side—that players give less and less of a fuck whether a game is gorgeous or not," he adds. "At this point, I feel like after you've been making a game for a year, the stuff you're adding at that point is not coming back on you. That's hard because there'll be certain types of games then that just can't be made, but unfortunately, right now, that's the way it is."
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