Hyper Light Breaker dev opens up about the stress of depending on a publisher under the corporate carousel of acquisitions, layoffs and closures: 'I don't know who I'm going to be working with in a few months'

pcgamer.com:

Hyper Light Breaker, the imminent sequel to Hyper Light Drifter, is one of those sequels that over-reaches itself. The ambition is simple: Take the immaculate vibes and stylish combat of the top-down isometric original, and do it all bigger and better in full 3D. The game is due to release in early access this year, though there's no firm date yet, and going by what we've played there's a good chance developer Heart Machine is going to pull it off.

The difference in scale between the original and Hyper Light Breaker, however, did mean one big change for the studio. It self-published the first game, and to considerable success, but a much longer development cycle and a bigger team meant that this time around it had to sign with a publisher to get the project over the line. So far, so usual, and let's not fall into the trap of thinking publishers are the industry's big bad: they're often the reason teams can take risks like this.

But this is, perhaps, a time when studios are looking at their publishers like never before. Not because of their intra-personal relationships, or the people they're working with, but the simple fact that the games industry is going through a horrific period of layoffs, studio closures, and cancellations. It is not a good time to be depending on one of the publishing giants for anyone, and the mood music among indie developers is at an incredibly low ebb.

In the runup to its initial release, Heart Machine's been taking part in a documentary by the excellent NoClip, during which the studio's founder and Hyper Light Breaker's creative director Alx Preston opens up about the anxieties of living under a corporate merry-go-round of cash and closures that may well one day drop an anvil on you (first spotted by GamesRadar+).

Thing is that Heart Machine is now on its third publisher in four years, but not because it's changed. The Hyper Light Drifter team initially signed on with publisher Perfect World, which became part of the Gearbox Publishing