Rami Ismail interview: Indie creativity, games and politics, dirty funding and getting back to making games

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Rami Ismail became famous as an ambassador for the indie games industry. He even won an award for his work from the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2018. But he closed his studio Vlambeer in 2020 after 10 years of making indie games with Jan Willem Nijman.

Since that time, he has been a consultant, a public speaker, a curator of talks and more. But he doesn’t have any games to talk about at the moment. During its 10 years as a two-person company, Vlambeer was responsible for making games like Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers, and Nuclear Throne.

Now Ismail is advising indies and observing the industry. At the recent Reboot Develop Blue event, he gave a talk on his ideas for surviving the indiepocalypse. We had a freewheeling talk about a number of subjects without any particular focus — kind of like an episode of Seinfeld, but from a very different point of view.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

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Rami Ismail: I’ve obviously been a bit in the background. I’ve mostly been consulting on projects. I’ve been looking at the ecosystem and where people are starting things, where people are building things, and where people are growing. It’s a strange time in the game industry at the moment. There’s quite a bit of opportunity, but also there’s a lot of risk aversion at the moment. Places where there’s not risk aversion tend to be very money-focused. It asks the question, where is the art part of the industry staying, the