Keoken Interactive: The way games are made and funded is "failing"
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It's been well established by now that things are tough in the games industry at the moment. Rather than future growth, many business leaders are focused on ensuring their business simply survives through 2024, with the ongoing wave of mass layoffs and closures a sign of how many are struggling.
For developers, that survival often relies on securing funding but, as investors have already told us, the bar for success when pitching has been raised much higher. Studios around the world are having trouble landing the capital they need to continue their current projects – and for some, including Deliver Us The Moon developer Keoken Interactive, time is running out.
Co-founder Koen Deetman tells GamesIndustry.biz that his studio has made an estimated 200 pitches for five games in the last two years, and none have resulted in a deal. The company has pitched for funding on both high and low budget projects, as well as publishing deals, and has gauged interest in acquisitions for both its IP and the studio itself.
In addition to expanding on its Deliver Us series, Keoken is trying to get new IP We Are Human off the ground, but this too has struggled. Realising the game isn't the right fit for certain publishers, it has adapted its prototypes but these efforts have been in vain.
"We understand some games don’t get signed or shouldn’t be made," Deetman tells us. "But to craft, adapt, and re-pitch five different games with more than 40 publishers and continuously be rejected because it’s too unique, it’s not unique enough, the budget is too high, the budget is too low, it’s too commercial, it’s not commercial enough – you start to wonder if it’s really just us that have to look in the mirror again, or that different issues are at play here."
"The model of how games were made is failing... Combined with a post-COVID correction, recession, inflation, and layoffs, it causes a tremendous downward spiral of
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