The real gamble in gaming is surviving to make the next game

Author: Reinout te Brake
Published: 2026-10-31T08:50:10+01:00
Updated: 2026-10-31T09:00:00Z
Canonical: https://reinouttebrake.com/stories/the-real-gamble-in-gaming-is-surviving-to-make-the-next-game
Source: https://reinouttebrakecom.wordpress.com/2026/10/31/the-real-gamble-in-gaming-is-surviving-to-make-the-next-game/

A hit can change a developer’s life. Building a studio that survives disappointment takes a different kind of ambition.

David Gardner remembers a project that had attracted $100 million in capital. After five years, the game shipped. It was generating around $500,000 in a month when, by his account, it needed $10 million.

For the veteran investor, whose investments include Supercell and Unity, it was a reminder of what happens when enthusiasm gets too far ahead of evidence. In a May interview with The Game Business (https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/could-ai-bring-investors-back-to), he described a period when a previous employer’s name could open investors’ wallets. Alumni of successful studios were funded to build large teams and pursue ambitious projects.

The people might have been talented. The game still had to find its audience.

That gap between backing people and proving a business runs through gaming in 2026. A funding announcement celebrates what a studio might become. Years later, the people working there must live with what the money committed them to deliver.

By then, changing direction can mean admitting that colleagues’ jobs, investors’ expectations and years of personal effort rest on assumptions that have not held up.

The figures surrounding the industry offer little comfort to an individual founder. Newzoo forecasts global game spending of $213.9 billion this year (https://newzoo.com/articles/2026-global-games-market-key-numbers). Yet growth across an entire market cannot tell a studio whether anyone will buy its particular game. There is no contradiction in an industry growing while talented teams run out of money (https://reinouttebrake.com/stories/gaming-is-growing-but-new-game-studios-are-getting-less-of-the-money).

In Montpellier, Guillaume Broche has chosen to resist one familiar response to success: getting bigger.

The Sandfall Interactive CEO, whose studio made Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, told AUTOMATON in July (https://automaton-media.com/en/interviews/clair-obscur-expedition-33-director-eliminating-limitations-is-a-big-mistake-we-talk-to-sandfall-interactive-about-staying-small-japanese-influences/) that the team numbered about 26. He described an office intended to feel like a house where friends make games, with pétanque and table tennis in the garden. More money, he argued, could tempt the studio to hire away every difficulty it had experienced. He wanted to preserve the limitations that forced creative choices.

There is a business decision inside that picture of working life. Every permanent hire raises the amount a company must earn before its next idea has even proved itself.

A small studio is not automatically efficient, and a large one is not automatically wasteful. Some games genuinely need substantial teams. But headcount becomes dangerous when it grows faster than the evidence supporting the game.

Months pass. Salaries are paid. Art improves. Features accumulate. None of that necessarily answers the question that matters: are people enjoying this enough to return, recommend it and eventually pay?

An expensive project can contain years of sincere, skilled work without yet becoming a convincing commercial proposition. That is painful to acknowledge precisely because the effort is real.

The difficult management conversations concern what has actually changed. Can players now experience the core idea? Are they coming back without being prompted? Does a revised release date reflect a workable plan, or simply move the financing problem further away?

A playable build helps answer some questions. It cannot answer all of them. A test session, a wishlist and a paying customer represent different degrees of commitment. A forecast that treats them as interchangeable can look reassuring long before the business deserves reassurance.

For Tim Bender, the relationship between a game and the company making it also depends on who gets paid after release.

The Hooded Horse CEO has criticised publishing agreements (https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/hooded-horse-co-founder-says-publishers-should-ditch-horrible-recoup-clauses-to-help-devs) that direct most or all early sales proceeds towards recovering the publisher’s investment. The publisher may have a portfolio to absorb disappointments. The developer may have only one game.

That imbalance can leave a team with a released product and too little cash to keep supporting it. Players need fixes and updates; employees need salaries. Sales alone do not settle either obligation if the money flows elsewhere.

Publishers can also bring expertise a small studio cannot afford to employ: marketing, localisation, platform relationships and release management. Keeping a larger share of sales means little if the game never reaches enough customers. The useful negotiation concerns what each party contributes, how costs are controlled and whether both can afford to keep working after launch. Independence has operating costs too. Someone still has to do the work that a good publishing partner would otherwise provide.

Bender now also manages Griffin’s Special Opportunities Fund, which finances individual games in exchange for revenue participation. Griffin described it as a $110 million fund in September (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/griffin-portfolio-highlights-q2-griffin-gaming-partners-h1dbe). The approach illustrates a useful distinction: financing a promising game need not require buying part of the studio.

It does not remove commercial risk. It changes how the parties share it.

That is where portfolio thinking becomes relevant even for a founder who can afford to make only one game at a time.

A studio cannot behave like an investment fund simply by starting several projects. Splitting a small team across five unfinished games may multiply its problems. The more useful question is whether the company is preserving the ability to try again.

That might mean testing several inexpensive ideas before committing to one, keeping fixed costs manageable, retaining useful technology and relationships, or combining original development with carefully chosen contract work. It also means resisting a plan in which anything short of a breakout hit closes the company.

There are limits. Some founders lack the capital to reserve a comfortable second chance. Contract work can consume the people needed for their own game. And stopping early can still be financially and personally brutal.

Planning for another attempt also changes what success means. A modest release that pays its costs, builds an audience and leaves the team intact may create a stronger foundation than a highly visible launch followed by layoffs. Equally, one successful game cannot promise a second success (https://reinouttebrake.com/stories/supercells-billion-dollar-game-how-a-finnish-studio-defied-the-odds-in-2024). Hiring against the assumption that every future release will perform as well makes yesterday’s good fortune part of tomorrow’s payroll. A reserve gives founders time to judge their next idea before employees become dependent on it.

Nevertheless, failure should be considered while there is still enough money to make decisions. A studio that discovers its problem only at launch may have spent its entire opportunity to learn.

Crowdfunding offers a more personal route into that uncertainty. In some respects, it can widen the friends-and-family circle: instead of asking a relative to believe in a founder, a team asks strangers to believe in a game.

The distinction matters. Friends may support the person. Backers generally want the promised experience. Winning them over can provide evidence of demand, but accepting their money creates expectations that a studio must fund and manage.

Kickstarter reported its strongest first quarter for videogames in thirteen years (https://updates.kickstarter.com/video-games-are-leveling-up-on-kickstarter/) in 2026. That is encouraging for developers who might otherwise lack access to early capital. It does not make every successful campaign a fully financed business. Fees, rewards and delivery still come out of the money raised.

Nor does it eliminate the need for someone to finance the work required to make the campaign credible in the first place.

Gardner sees potential in smaller teams and AI-assisted development (https://reinouttebrake.com/stories/the-future-of-game-development-can-ai-innovation-and-human-creativity-coexist) shortening the journey towards useful evidence. That remains an investment thesis, rather than a guarantee that software will make games cheaper or better. Faster production only helps if a team learns something worth acting on.

The same discipline applies to investors. Another cheque can finance a necessary breakthrough. It can also postpone a decision nobody wants to make. What matters is what the next period of spending will establish, and what happens if it establishes the wrong thing.

For the people inside a studio, this can sound unromantic. They came to make characters, worlds and experiences that stay with players. They did not necessarily come to negotiate payment priorities or decide which features their colleagues must abandon.

But those choices determine whether the team gets to stay together.

A hit can buy a studio another chance. Sensible financing and honest management can help it survive when the hit does not arrive. The real measure of a games business is whether the people who learned from its first release will still have somewhere to work when it is time to make the second.