Adam Boyes: "You can't hide from the realities of what's happening in the industry"

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With the current economic recession and the layoffs, Iron Galaxy Studios co-CEO Adam Boyes tells GamesIndustry.biz that it's a daunting time right now.

"Any time we see headlines like we're seeing regularly, I think it's scary for everyone in the games industry. It's got to be scary obviously for people that work at studios because the future isn't clear," says Boyes.

"I think COVID taught us a lot of resiliency as an industry. We drove so many eyeballs to people playing games. Now, this is sort of an overcorrection negatively impacting so many people."

However, Boyes notes that the business still has to move on for Iron Galaxy despite the current market conditions. He owes this to Dave Lang, who founded the games firm 15 years ago. After experiencing four prior studio closures, Lang established the studio to maintain stability within the industry.

"The key is we work on so many different franchises and products with different partners that creates more of a spider web sort of support system," said Boyes. "At Iron Galaxy, we try to have a myriad of partners and projects to create a bit more stability."

Boyes uses the studio itself — which both develops original games and offers co-development services — as an example of what happens when a project falls through. He took note of when Rumbleverse was shutdown back in 2023.

"We still have a lot of different partners. Even when Epic Games announced that it would no longer support Rumbleverse, we took that offline. A lot of developers were obviously working on that [title].

"How do we work with partners to redeploy those people? The good news is that people still want play games. Because we [provide] support with original IP development and with porting work, we build a ton of different content for a ton of different people."

The executive finds that the challenges game makers currently case could also be further exacerbated by the industry itself; fewer