Chicory Publisher Says Indie Games Got Wildly Expensive to Make

Rebekah Saltsman is a CEO at Finji, a mom-and-pop game studio founded by her and her husband, Adam Saltsman, in 2006. Along with their indie publishing business, the couple also tries to focus on their own projects whenever they have such a possibility, even though the industry is quite demanding and is getting extremely costly. 

In 2019, Finji released a post-apocalyptic survival game Overland for mobile devices, PCs, and consoles, at the same time, publishing other studio's games like Wilmot's Warehouse and Night in the Woods along with getting ready for the upcoming Chicory: A Colorful Tale release. Today, when Chicory is published, the studio is preparing for the release of the action-adventure game Tunic in March 2022 and working on The Glory Society project as well as hiring staff to work on another internal project.

In an interview for IGN, Saltsman shared that it is quite challenging to balance the two sides of the business. Despite they derive great pleasure from publishing with Finji, they still have to manage to develop their own games which also takes plenty of time, taking into account how they take care of their projects doing mentorship works and supporting the studio's partners during the development. Therefore, Finji is quite picky about its projects, says Saltsman.

However, it is the publishing projects that keep Finji relevant and sustainable. So, it is crucial to have the right work-life balance for the team to manage both publishing and producing their own games.

“In order to be sustainable, you have to be relevant. At least that's how we view it," explains Saltsman, "And a lot of the publishing stuff helps modulate relevancy year after year. A lot of indies launch a game and then disappear for three years, and then come back and launch a game. And from the outside, from a public standpoint, that's just not a big deal because it's hard to develop fan bases anyways.

Saltsman, nevertheless, assumes that from the perspective of biz-dev and publishing, it is not really reasonable to disappear for a couple of years as when you come back to the industry again, you could have missed "all the small gradual shifts that have happened". She also remarks: "And at some point, the game industry took a hard U-turn and is now heading in a different direction ...  it's completely changed three times over since you last launched. So, publishing means that we're never out of touch.”

Saltsman endeavors to keep being informed about the up-to-date genres, mechanics, and ideas as well as being aware of other, broader trends in the industry. She claims that one of the greatest challenges for indie developers and publishers now is how incredibly expensive everything's become. She says that their budgets got "ridiculous": “Five years ago, I'm like, ‘Oh, I can make a game for a million dollars.’ And that was crazy then. And [now] I'm like, ‘I can't make this for under four [million]’, which is crazy because it's so much money, and then you do the math on how many units that is.”

Saltsman explains that small games usually charge $10-$20 depending on how much the platform takes, however, the consumers see just 70% of that. Besides, there are other cuts involved. So, spending millions on making a game, it's hard to earn the money back and make a profit even for the most successful publishers and developers.

Besides, Saltsman mentions that only a few indies hit 100,000 copies. It takes time and effort to develop a game. "We don't have 15 Environment Artists to fill up this beautiful, lush world. So, how can we do it?” she adds.

Another current trend Saltsman noticed is repeating cycles of the expansion and contraction of the industry: new hardware comes out along with huge budgets are funded, but later on, the budgets shrink as a platform store is not filled up and more games, produced or developed by major publishers, are launched.

Rebekah Saltsman is always thrilled to see new funding for indies. However, she mentions that, unfortunately, a lot of indie publishing contracts demand IP rights, take a large percentage of revenue, or even try to short-change indie developers. Having not much of a choice, smaller indie developers may take such deals to get their game funded or to be noticed inside the indie space.

So, Satlsmen advises indie game publishers to "do [the] homework" – take effort and be thorough with working on indie projects. "Do right by the people that are entrusting you with their life’s work," she says. "They took years to make it and you just can't treat that callously. You have to respect the craft. If people do it right and respect the creators, and the work it took to make it, those are the publishers that I think are going to continue to exist and do really well.”

You can read the original interview with Rebekah here. Learn more about Rebekah Saltsman and Finji studio on LinkedIn or follow Finji on Twitter. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.