How Stray Fawn survived eight years as an indie with no investors or publisher

gamesindustry.biz:

Speaking at Devcom, Stray Fawn co-founder Philomena Schwab shared how the Zurich-based studio has survived for the past eight years, from refusing to partner with a publisher to the importance of community support when developing a game.

Schwab emphasised that Stray Fawn prides itself on being an independent studio, with no publisher or external investors.

Even when its first game, genetics survival title Niche, started getting publisher interest after crowdfunding success, the studio continued to decline offers. This was due to previous experience from making a mobile game which had a publisher that didn't go so well.

"So I thought the next time a game flops, I want to be fully responsible for that game flopping," she explained. "It's not up to somebody else to flop my game. This will be on me, so we declined the offers that we had."

Stray Fawn still declined publisher offers even with the recent success of The Wandering Village (despite being "harder to say no").

"I think we had 50 or so publishers reaching out," Schwab recalled. "Some we were very tempted to work with as it was such a risky project. But we decided we didn't want to do that – not just because we wanted to keep all the revenue, but also because we didn't want to have any external deadlines, and we didn't want to compromise on the game's quality."

This aligned with Stray Fawn's ethos, in that the team wanted it to be owned by the developers without a third-party.

"It was never our intention to build a studio and sell it in the next five to ten years," she said. "What we wanted to do is build a place where we can enjoy creating games together and make a living."

And since founding the studio, the way in which developers make a living is by earning the same salary.

Also, if someone works for the developer for three years, they get the same bonus as the founders. The only other factor is if an employee is working part-time or full-time.

"The next time a game flops, I want to be fully responsible for that game