No More Robots, the UK-based independent publisher founded by Mike Rose, has achieved considerable success over the years. Since it was founded in 2017, the company has released a number of titles, including Not tonight, Yes, Your Grace., Hypnospace Outlaws, Let's build a zoo, Spirit teaAND Descendants.
The latter was the publisher's first signature project and remains one of its most successful, attracting a feverishly loyal community after filling a gap in the extreme sports market when it launched in 2018. It is now finally a sequel in Subsequent descendantswhich aims to become the downhill bike par excellence.
For No More Robots and founder Rose, the revelation of Subsequent descendants represents a watershed moment. An opportunity to reflect on how much has changed since the publisher took its first steps seven years ago. How has the business evolved since then? Well, Rose says it’s pretty much “fucked.”
There's an implosion coming, so bolt the hatches.
It’s a pretty blunt assessment, but with layoffs sweeping the industry while studios and publishers alike are dying like flies, you might be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to argue. Rose explains that there are a few high-level reasons for the crisis. The pandemic sales boom that came with lockdowns. The subsequent overinvestment and growth projections that never materialized. The economic impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The rampant merger and acquisition wave that saw numerous studios and publishers gobbled up by struggling conglomerates. The misguided belief that IPOs are somehow the promised land.
Rose suggests that this is a recipe for only one thing: a market implosion. But is there anything publishers can do to survive? Maybe.
For starters, he says it's time to admit that platform owners are no longer serving the interests of small publishers. “The problem with the new situation is that all I did when No More Robots started was, you know, get brazen. [Xbox Game Pass] deals and getting on the front page of Stream—it’s no longer available,” he says. “None of that is available anymore. When there’s a Steam Summer Sale, it’s absolutely triple-A all the way that they paid for those slots. Summer sales used to burn us a year’s worth of interest, and now it’s a big spike.”
Rose says indies have been sidelined on Steam after Microsoft, Sony, EA and other big players chose to bring titles that might previously have been console exclusives to PC. “Steam is making more money,” he says, “but about 50 percent of that revenue is coming from 1 percent of games.”
Rose believes part of the solution is to seriously mitigate the risks you take as a publisher. To think long-term without fixating on exponential growth. He argues that more companies need to accept that success in video games doesn’t have to be about rapid expansion and chart-topping hits, but rather about pragmatic survival.
“After 2022, when everything seemed fucked, we just stopped signing stuff,” he explains. “For a long time, we just stopped signing stuff because I was like, ‘This is a cycle of death.’ What we need to do is get better at making more money from the back catalog that we have. And we have. We’ve entered an incredible cycle in the last couple of years, where as cynical as it sounds, we’ve squeezed every penny out of the games that we have.
“So the games that we already had were making more money than before because we had been so focused on that. But at the beginning of this year, when everyone started closing down, I started to realize that if we keep doing this, it's not going to be good. If we don't have games, what happens? Our new plan is essentially to sign a lot of new stuff. […] but they are all very cheap and quick projects, realized immediately.”
Rose explains that those projects were signed on the basis that they would take months, not years, to develop. That also means shorter lead times between reveal and release, perhaps giving them a better chance to become entrenched in consumer consciousness. “I’ve signed five new things in the last few months, and the plan is for them all to come out within the next year, and the hope is that they all bounce back very quickly,” he adds. “So if a couple of them are really successful, then we’ll say, ‘OK, let’s put it on Switch or let’s see if Game Pass wants to come in.’”
It’s an approach that might not generate a “blowout” in sales, but that’s the point. By signing low-risk projects, No More Robots doesn’t need to hit a home run every time it goes to bat.
Want to pitch to publishers? Better to be “fucking stingy or expensive as hell”
If you think this all sounds a little pessimistic, Rose is right there with you. But maybe there’s room for a little more cynicism if it can help save an industry that so often tries to run before it can walk. “I often feel like this old, whiny, white guy,” he says. “That’s how I think people see me, and I am. But for good reason. Last year, a number of press outlets reached out to me and said, ‘Hey Mike, we’re doing our year-end recap and looking at what’s going to happen to publishers in 2024. We’re hearing a lot of good things.’
“I emailed back and said, 'I don't know who you're hearing this from, but they're so wrong. Next year is going to be worse. There's nothing else to say, and now obviously we've seen how this year is going. People who say 'survive until 2025' make me sad because they think it's going to be better. I understand the point of optimism, and I may cut years off my life by being pessimistic, but I also have a sustainable business because of my pessimism.”
Rose says there were times when No More Robots could have gone crazy. People told him to hire “a lot of people” after the publisher had released a few hits. But he was sure the good times wouldn’t last, and suggests he’d be a “fucking idiot” to believe No More Robots had somehow become invincible. Success isn’t permanent. It’s a drum that keeps beating, but it’s become the key to No More Robots’ survival.
Where does this leave developers? Rose says there are currently two types of games you can pitch to publishers: “either cheap as hell or expensive as hell.” Anything in between gets rejected. “There are publishers who will accept cheap, low-risk games, like us,” he continues. “But there are publishers. Companies like Devolver, for example: I don’t know what numbers they’re looking for, but it’s going to be ridiculous numbers. […] If they sign a mediocre game for $400,000 or something, it seems weak. It seems like they're signing a small game. But $400,000 is too much for me.”
Rose has yet to make a pitch on a personal level, but he says it’s crucial that developers understand and communicate their needs effectively. “Sometimes they’ll ask for too little money. They’ll say, ‘It’s going to take X amount of time but it’s only going to cost this much because we’re going to live on a budget,’” he says.
He believes another myth that traps developers is the idea that more time in development equals more sales. “That's not true. It's just not true. And if anything, you can see now, especially visually, that players care less and less whether a game is good or not,” he adds. “At this point, I feel like after a year of making a game, the things you add in that time are not going to come back. It's difficult because there are going to be certain types of games that just can't be made, but unfortunately, at the moment, that's the way things are.”
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