'There is a large group of players that are genuinely looking for new games multiple times a year.'
Every week since mid-2023, the game industry has been given brutal reminder after brutal reminder that the video game marketplace is very tough right now for developers of all shapes and sizes. Even as games like Fortnite dominate the market, Epic Games still laid off workers. And teams like Surgent Studios have learned the hard way that you can release a game like Tales of Kenzara to positive reviews, and still not earn enough money to keep your team employed.
These and other challenges have sent many publishers scrambling for new audiences in the world of UGC games like Roblox, ripening field of browser-based games built on WebGPU, or the growing PC market emerging in China. "Why," they might ask "should we take big bets on the saturated PC and console markets?"
Well some still are—like Kepler Interactive, the British publisher whose portfolio ranges from driving survival game Pacific Drive, to soccer sim Rematch, to the colorful Metroid-inspired Ultros to the upcoming French-inspired fantasy game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It's an eccentric portfolio for the publisher that started out with the martial arts action title Sifu, one only united by the idea that somewhere out there, there is an audience of interested players out there in the deeply-stuffed marketplace.
Kepler Interactive senior portfolio manager Matthew Handrahan (a former comrade in the world of B2B games journalism) has looked at the market numbers, and admits they paint a "pretty frightening picture." But he argues the focus on high interest in older games obscures a key fact driving his work: "The relatively small percentage of people that buy new games, I do think actually buy quite a lot of new games each year," he said in a recent chat with Game Developer.
That audience might not be purchasing all of Kepler's games. But the publisher's bet, he said, is that there are different pockets of players with different interests who make those purchasing decisions. He thinks developers should know that even in hard times, those audiences are worth chasing, especially if you have a unique game worth making.
According to Handrahan, Kepler Interactive's overall publishing strategy runs on something of a "gut feeling" approach. The strategy, he said, is to look for games that folks inside the publisher are excited about and will advocate for. While the team still considers traditional publisher needs like budgets and production viability, there's a sense that if someone at Kepler is really passionate about the game, there will be an audience out there who will feel as equally excited and will want to play it. Having staffers with different tastes helps the team cast a wide net and diversify its portfolio.
Devs wanting to catch the attention of Handrahan and his peers should know that they're looking for what he calls "a real specificity." "Take Sifu for example," he said. "Sifu could very easily be a 2D side-scrolling pixel art game, right? It has a similar structure to many of those games...but what Sloclap really [wanted] to do there was to emulate a certain style of Hong Kong action cinema. Not just the martial arts moves, but also the way the camera moves and the editing."
Calling that vision "specific," he said it's the main reason the game stood out from similar titles on the market.
He nodded to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Pacific Drive as two other games with "specific" visions. "It's a case of starting with an experience they wanted to create and then working [their] way to the gameplay that's going to deliver that. I see a lot of pitches each year, and I get the impression that a lot of pitches go the other way around. They start in a genre and work towards the theme and you just end up in a place that that's quite simple."
"We want our games to genuinely situate themselves more broadly in culture, not just video games."
Image via Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive.
If you're the data-driven type who bristles at the gut-feeling approach Handrahand decides—that's fair. "It does sound simplistic," he admitted. "But actually I feel like any other approach is just as easy to pick apart." He nodded to market-driven publishing strategies that encourage developers to iterate on popular genres. "What is the market going to be in two years time or three years time? I think there is a danger in looking at what's there today and then signing a game on the basis of that because you 20 other companies might have done exactly the same thing, and by the time you come to market, everything's saturated."
Handrahand still hedged some bets about Kepler's "gut feel" strategy, seeming to acknowledge that the realities of the market still can trump an incredible vision. He namechecked three genres—Metroidvanias, first-person narrative games, and 2.5 sidescrollers—as spaces so saturated that developers could only bet on success with low budgets and small teams.
It's a message he sometimes has to deliver to developers with great pitches he runs into when out at events. He seemed a bit sheepish—saying he's not a "blunt" person and that it can be hard to give that kind of feedback.
But he's trying to be more comfortable communicating that difficulty, and encouraging developers to explore if their vision can be adjusted to match the market. He said it's worth doing because "if it's something you can see they're really passionate about, then try to steer them towards something you legitimately feel could [be] more interesting to publishers at large."
Image via Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive.
And if you're pitching Kepler right now, you'd do well to come with one hell of a pitch deck and first playable. The team still believes in visions, but with the "buyer's market" for publishers at the moment, the bar for what developers are bringing to the table is higher than ever. Kepler's advice differed from the likes we've heard from Finji CEO Bekah Saltsman, so be sure to practice due diligence on what the folks you're talking to are looking for in a pitch deck.
Handrahand said he looks for dense pitch decks alongside a first playable that lays out high level game ideas, and works through core aspects of a game like progression, systems, and narrative (if those are key pillars in your game). Calling himself a "freak," he said he doesn't like the idea that developers aren't supposed to overwhelm publishers with long slide decks. "That might just be because I'm a [former] journalist, and I'm used to reading lots of things, but I think...you don't want to leave too many question marks, because you shouldn't assume you'll get the opportunity for those questions to be answered at any point."
That said, you don't need to open your pitch with the 20 page long lore document explaining the unique game world you're in. He suggested developers producing lean decks produce appendices and supplemental documents they can hand over to interested parties.
Those documents should have some kind of sense of the game's budget, partly because Handrahand and his colleagues need to know if it's the kind of budget Kepler can even support. It's unfortunately a bit of a goldilocks situation—your budget can't be too big or too small, but somehow just right.
The fact Kepler still sees fertile ground in the traditional PC an console markets isn't a panacea for all of the game industry's woes. The company can only publish so many games, and while similar outfits like Raw Fury, Fellow Traveler, and Hooded Horse are equally focused on the market, there just isn't enough cash to go around—and not every game these groups publish will find its audience.
But Kepler's business bet (that's already paid dividends) is that those audiences are, in one way or another, out there. That attitude is a quiet pushback against some of the emerging wisdom around the video game industry contraction of the last few years. It's getting tiring going on LinkedIn and reading a random executive slagging the conventional games market and insisting developers start crunching on games for Roblox.
There is wisdom in looking for fresh players—but with the right strategy, publishers and developers alike can find those players where they already are.
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