Indie games blaze a trail beyond blockbusters

PARIS/COLOGNE:

Developer Jonathan Jacques-Belletete has taken a gamble on forthcoming game Hell is Us, hoping to ape the budget success of indie hit Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to tangle with industry heavyweights.

"I'd had it up to here" with work on big-spending productions whose price tag can run into the hundreds of millions, the veteran of firms like Ubisoft and Eidos Montreal told AFP. "I wanted to try something new, with more agility and creativity."

After five years of development, Montreal-based studio Rogue Factor is at this week's Gamescom trade fair in Cologne to debut their action game for Xbox Series, PlayStation and PC before its September 4 release.

Setting itself apart with eerie visuals, Hell is Us drops players into a fictional country in Eastern Europe in the throes of civil war, fighting supernatural creatures with backup from a hovering drone that perches on the protagonist's shoulder. Players are offered no map and no on-screen pointers to the next objectives or the stage in the game's story.

Creative director Jacques-Belletete said he wanted to "break" with ingrained habits, offering a grittier experience to those players happy to die or run into game-over screens more regularly. The 48-year-old has previous credits on series like Assassin's Creed and Deux Ex, and also directed the game adaptation of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy.

"I'd seen just about everything" in the industry, Jacques-Belletete said. Big-budget so-called "AAA" games "cost so much to develop that you have to sell astronomical numbers of them to recoup your investment" — leading to a lowest-common-denominator and "rather lukewarm gaming experiences," he said at a Paris event previewing his own game.

Jacques-Belletete joined Rogue Factor in 2019, determined to try an alternative approach. The 50-strong team worked with a "much smaller" budget than typical for a major release, although he did not reveal a figure.

He argued that this choice had given them the freedom to experiment more, integrating new elements and features with a rapid prototyping approach that would risk being strangled at more hierarchical big developers.

That same formula paid off this year for small French studio Sandfall Interactive, whose first game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, sold four million copies -- a major coup for a relatively small team. "When we saw the success they had, we were very happy, that's very much what we've tried to do," Jacques-Belletete said.

Across the industry, "there's something that doesn't quite add up any more," he added, pointing to "a kind of mania for big projects." At the same time, "the industry has had huge difficulties in recent years" with waves of layoffs at major players like Sony and Microsoft — where smaller outfits "seem to have held up better against the storm."

"We're clearly blazing a very valuable, capable alternative path," Jacques-Belletete argued.

Kepler's rise

Games publisher Kepler Interactive has notched up two of the breakout titles of the year with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Rematch, reaping the rewards for developing independent projects on tight budgets.

"It's almost impossible to predict a success like Expedition 33," Kepler chief Alexis Garavaryan told AFP ahead of the Gamescom trade show in Cologne, where he will be on the lookout for future hits.

Developed by a small French studio, the role-playing title with its Belle Epoque style setting has notched up glowing reviews, four million sales and a message of congratulations from President Emmanuel Macron. The response crowned four years of hard work for Kepler, founded by seven independent studios with a $120 million investment from Chinese tech giant NetEase in 2021.

Garvaryan believes Kepler's unusual structure — each studio is a part owner — allows for better decision-making as developers who have already had several hit games have input into the group's direction.

Based in London with around 50 employees, Kepler also publishes games from studios that do not belong to the group. Unlike most publishers, it does not demand a high level of control over production of the games in its stable.

Kepler "never forces a decision on the teams," Garavaryan said. "We're just there to guide them and help them along, not to interfere." That promise of creative freedom encouraged the team behind Expedition 33 to sign up with Kepler, rather than one of their other publishing suitors.

"We liked their vision, the aspect of a publisher set up by developers who know what it's like being a studio," said Francois Meurisse, co-founder of creators Sandfall.

Kepler enlisted star actors like Andy Serkis and Charlie Cox to lend their voices to characters, and struck a deal with Microsoft to add Expedition 33 to its Gamepass subscription service as soon as the title was released.

"We're very selective: we look at 1,400 projects per year on average and only sign up two or three," Garavaryan said. He added that projects with "restrained budgets" but "sufficiently strong visual rendition and innovative game mechanics" were Kepler's unique selling point.

French studio Sloclap, Kepler's biggest member with 135 staff, applied that formula for the hit football game Rematch that reached five million players in just one month.

Sloclap chief Pierre de Margerie said that they shared with Expedition 33 both "an original proposal and quality execution". "The creative freedom we have is also tied to the fact that we don't need to sell five or 15 million copies to turn a profit," he added.

Compared with so-called "AAA" blockbusters, whose development costs can run into the hundreds of millions, Kepler's titles are "more sustainable, more lean," said Rhys Elliott of gaming data firm Alinea Analytics. The production style "is going to be a real test case for the rest of the industry," he added.