How to survive until 2025 in the games industry

gamesindustry.biz:

'Survive until 2025.' The phrase still echoes around the games industry as it faces ongoing layoffs and studio closures.

At Develop:Brighton this year, GamesIndustry.biz invited an array of developers, studio heads, managers, and more to share their advice on how to endure the turbulent times we're experiencing. Here's what they had to say:

CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson kicked things off by sharing a survival story from the Eve Online developer's early years, which still applies to those trying to find funding in 2024.

"We were in the internet bubble, it was amazing," Pétursson told attendees. "We raised $1.6 million but by April 2000, we figured out we only had the money to make half of Eve Online."

The studio began reaching out to more investors in 2001 but "didn't get very far." In the end, an Icelandic phone company became an equity investor, which kept them going until 2002, and selling publishing rights to Simon & Schuster, the US book publisher, got them through to 2003. The game launched that year and, the CEO laughs, "we've been chasing our tail ever since."

Caroline Marchal, CEO and creative director of As Dusk Falls developer Interior Night, said the most important thing she has done over the past two years was to listen to the recommendations from her board of directors.

While she acknowledged that smaller studios will not have a board, she urged them to seek similar people that can advise them.

"They are not friends, they are respected people coming from different industries or who have different skillsets than me – entrepreneurship, finances, and so on," she said. "They've seen more than me. I focus on the tree, which is the studio, while they look at the forest. They also have less skin in the game so they're more objective than me, and they have experience in other fields. They push me to make the hard decisions you don't want to make."

Ella Romanos, COO of Fundamentally Games, said that the best thing in the current situation is to really examine what is