The digital shift and treating developers right: Devolver's Struthers looks back on the label's first decade

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Of all the many indie publishers that have popped up in the last decade, arguably the hardest to ignore has been Devolver Digital.

Infamous for its loud and brash marketing, stable of quirky and interesting games and, er, fictional chief financial officer Fork Parker, the label turns ten this year. While from the outside looking in it would appear that Devolver has had an easy run, this isn't really the case. Prior to the indie publisher's birth in 2009, many of its founders had been involved in similar projects, with Mike Wilson, Harry Miller and Rick Stults had previously co-founded both Gathering of Developers (GOD) and, um, Gamecock Media in 1998 and 2007 respectively. The sentiment was always the same; to treat developers as the artists they are and letting them get on with making the game while the publisher handles all the boring stuff.

Within three years of being established, GOD and Gamecock were both acquired by other companies and subsequently shut down. But Devolver has lasted far longer than those ventures, with co-founder Graeme Struthers saying that the shift to digital let the firm succeed.

"We've always been PC-first but the truth of it was that being a small company, if a game is going to cost $1m to make, in the world of retail, cost of goods, manufacturing, production, warehousing, salespeople, you'd have to spend another $1.5m in those days to then ship it into retail," he tells PCGamesInsider.biz.

"And even if your game does well, you're still going to be waiting another three, four, five months to get that money back from retail. The $1m game ends up costing $3m and you have to then wait six months before you get any of your money back. Cashflow is just horrible. With digital, you get paid every