How LuGus Studios Turned a Viral Prototype Into a Successful Business

Sustaining an independent game studio for over a decade is no small feat, especially in an industry defined by volatility, shifting markets, and rising production costs. Yet LuGus Studios has not only endured for more than 15 years, but it has also carved out a distinct niche as a leader in highly advanced drone simulation experiences.

The studio’s journey began before its official founding in 2011, tracing back to student days and early experiments that would eventually evolve into a full-fledged business. Like many indie teams, LuGus initially relied on work-for-hire projects, building serious games for clients while navigating inconsistent cash flow and the constant pressure of sustainability.

Everything changed with the release of Liftoff, a drone simulator that demonstrated the power of building an audience before building the product itself. 

In this interview, studio co-founder and manager Kevin Haelterman reflects on their production pipeline, their philosophy of staying lean while maximizing impact, and how they’ve maintained relevance by treating their games as evolving platforms rather than one-time releases. 

LuGus Studios has been around since 2009, or maybe earlier? Can you walk us through how the studio came to be? What was the initial spark, and what were those early days like when you were getting everything off the ground? 

Kevin Haelterman, Studio Co-Founder and Manager: Officially, the company was founded in 2011. But a few years earlier, I remember sketching our company name and logo on a napkin in the school cafeteria. My co-founder, Tom Lissens, and I met at school, and during our Master’s years in “Graphic Design: Game & Digital Design”, we began shaping what would grow into a 15+ year adventure. So yes, 2009 is probably when the first spark of LuGus Studios was lit. 

In the early years, we ran LuGus Studios mostly as a game-dev-as-a-service company, building serious games for other companies and organizations. We were pretty good at it: within the first four years, we created around 30 small games. At first, finding clients was a constant struggle, but over time, companies started finding their way to us. Word got around. 

That said, in a B2B model, you’re completely dependent on clients, not just for work coming in, but for timely payments and realistic expectations about what can be delivered within a given time and budget. Even when things were going well, this created major challenges. A consistent cash flow wasn’t always guaranteed. We could stay afloat as a company, but there was little room to grow, and there was a constant pressure that we were always one missed project away from going under. So “success” for us mostly meant “surviving”. 

That changed in 2015, when we caught a lucky break with our first self-published release. 

Looking back at your first commercial projects, which ones do you consider pivotal in establishing LuGus Studios' identity and proving the business model could work? What made those projects successful, where others might have struggled? 

Kevin Haelterman: The launch of our drone simulator “Liftoff” in 2015 was that pivotal moment. In between client projects, we prototyped our own ideas, and Liftoff was really the project that got us “off the ground”. This is when we transitioned from a company doing work-for-hire projects to a company that we are today: a world-leader in building highly advanced drone simulators. In 2015, FPV (first-person view) drone flying was a new thing, and we jumped on it immediately. We found our classic gap in the market that no one has served yet, and we claimed it as ours. 

We proved it could work by... cheating a little, in a good way. Instead of building the game, we built an audience first. After just one week on a prototype, we decided to make a teaser trailer for Liftoff. No real game yet, but enough to share a vision. It went viral in the drone community, and suddenly we had an audience. Only then did we build the actual simulator. Lesson learned: start building your community from the start and scale your project based on how the public responds.

How does LuGus Studios operate day-to-day? Walk us through your production pipeline: from initial concept to launch. How do you balance creative ambition with the practical realities of running a sustainable studio? 

Kevin Haelterman: We like to start building as fast as possible. Once a project exists in any form, creativity kicks in, and it becomes much easier to add, tweak, and evolve. You’d expect us to start with gameplay loops, but ironically, we often begin with the menu and UI. Launching a project and being greeted by a polished experience makes it feel real. The content may not be there yet behind every button, but that early layer of polish helps us feel the game we’re trying to make, and it’s perfect for early showcases and demos. 

From there, everything grows organically. Programmers prototype, artists sculpt, all guided by a shared vision. The true shape of a project isn’t decided upfront; it’s discovered along the way, by seeing what works and what doesn’t. Design by doing. You can plan everything in a massive design document, but we’ve learned that what sounds great on paper doesn’t always work in reality. 

This approach really works for us. We’re not constrained by rigid plans; instead, it leaves room for happy accidents and rapid iteration that helps us refine systems along the way. What keeps us going isn’t just the outcome, but the process itself. More often than not, the project we end up launching looks different from what we first envisioned, and usually for the better. Of course, once you launch, even in Early Access, you need a clear plan, and you have to be explicit about what your audience can expect. But by involving our community throughout the journey, we continue to uncover new possibilities and fresh perspectives. 

Truth be told, our organic and laissez-faire approach often gives us impostor syndrome; it feels like we’re doing it wrong. And yet…our projects work out every time, which tells us there’s method in the madness. That’s also where the sustainability lies: if the projects succeed, the path we took to get there matters far less.

You've managed to keep the studio going for over 15 years in an industry known for its volatility. What's your current team size, and what strategies have you employed to maintain lean operations without sacrificing quality? How do you decide when to scale up versus keeping things tight? 

Kevin Haelterman: We’ve never really asked ourselves whether to scale up or stay small, because for us, that’s not the question that matters. 

You can have 100 developers and a burn rate that drags you into deep trouble, or a team of 10 that builds something truly impactful and profitable. Some of the most successful projects in game history started as solo-dev projects (for example: Minecraft). 

Our team currently consists of 13 people, not a big team, but we make it work. To us, real size and real growth are measured by impact: the impact on users, on the industry, on what we contribute to the world, whether as entertainment or beyond. Scaling headcount has never been a goal. When we hire, it’s usually to relieve a specific bottleneck, not to grow for growth’s sake.

Instead of getting bigger, we focus on getting better: improving our processes, becoming more efficient, and building our own tools (we just launched our own home-brewed project planning tool called P.U.D.D.I.N.G.). That keeps us lean, while our impact…and yes, our revenue, continues to grow year after year. 

What projects are you actively working on right now, and how do they reflect where LuGus Studios is headed? Are you seeing any shifts in the types of games or platforms you're targeting compared to five years ago? 

Kevin Haelterman: Honestly, too many projects, not all are even games: some are our internal tools or even community projects. 

Of course, our main priority is always to keep our existing projects, Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing and its spinoff, Liftoff: Micro Drones, alive. This takes the majority of our time. We’re basically running these projects like live services without pushing the typical toxic monetization that comes with it. It means we keep being a market-leader in our niche for 10 years and counting. 

We’re also working on the next game in the Liftoff franchise, currently in prototype: Liftoff: Offworld. It’s a physics sandbox where you can authentically pilot drones on Mars and Titan (the Saturn moon), mirroring real and future space exploration missions. But we’re not stopping there. We’re experimenting with zero-gravity drone flights, thruster-based vehicles, and more. We’re taking Liftoff offworld, because while they say the sky’s the limit… we disagree!

For us, this is a natural extension of the projects we've been developing for over 10 years, continuing to serve our loyal audience while also welcoming new fans, like the space enthusiast community, into the Liftoff family.

The game development landscape has changed dramatically: rising production costs, market saturation, discoverability issues. What are the biggest challenges you're facing in 2026, and how are you adapting to them? 

Kevin Haelterman: Serving a niche market and earning the respect of our audience puts us in a pretty privileged spot. Let’s be honest, drones have a huge future ahead, and we’re lucky to be riding that wave. We are less affected by market saturation and discoverability. That said, we’re not blind to the bigger challenges the industry and the world are facing. It feels like we’re in a period of transition, and not always for the better. 

Right now, many of our own challenges come from factors beyond our control. People are dealing with real-life pressures, rising living costs, housing challenges, and shifts in industry and policy. Taken together, these personal and external stresses can weigh heavily on individuals, and that inevitably ripples through company culture. At the heart of it, a studio isn’t a machine; it’s a group of people. Creating an environment where everyone feels supported and understood takes care, time, and a lot of energy.

We’re making a conscious effort to create more moments for feedback and connection, and to invest further in team-building initiatives. We’ve also welcomed our first project manager, a role that, in reality, is more about supporting the people behind the projects. All of this is part of our ongoing evolution and growth as a company. 

The distribution landscape has evolved significantly since you started. How do you approach releasing games now: which platforms and channels are you prioritizing, and how has that calculus changed over the years? 

Kevin Haelterman: With a few exceptions, like the console release of Liftoff, we’ve consistently focused on self-publishing on Steam, and that remains our plan going forward. We’ve built a strong, existing audience there and developed a close relationship with the platform, which makes continuing on Steam a natural and easy choice for us.

Customer acquisition is often the make-or-break factor for indie and mid-size studios. What's your approach to marketing and building an audience? Are you relying on traditional channels, community building, publisher relationships, or something else entirely? 

Kevin Haelterman: For us, updates are marketing. We’ve always treated the Liftoff simulators as live services, delivering hundreds of free updates over the years. What that really means is a constant, organic marketing engine, keeping the projects relevant, giving people something to talk about, and inspiring them to create and share content. 

This approach also shapes what we update. We focus on what excites our audience. A great example was the recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland, which became a hotspot for drone pilots capturing cinematic footage over lava flows. So we built our next level in Iceland, complete with an authentic virtual volcano, flowing lava, and volcanic caves. Suddenly, FPV channels were filled with dramatic lava-flight videos, made in Liftoff, and that buzz translated directly into more sales. 

We take a similar approach through partnerships: working with well-known drone brands to include their latest models, or collaborating with FPV creators by recreating iconic locations and homes from famous YouTube videos. The result is excitement, familiarity, and a community that naturally becomes our marketing by creating and sharing what they love. 

Lastly, our simulators have evolved into much more than just flying experiences. They’ve grown into an ever-expanding toolkit where users can design and share their own drones, build race tracks for competitive play, create custom drone HUDs, and more. Today, over 

25,000 pieces of community-created content are shared on the Steam Workshop. This doesn’t just mean an endless stream of new content to explore; it fosters a strong sense of ownership and loyalty within our community.

Belgium has a smaller but growing game development scene compared to hubs like Montreal or Stockholm. How would you characterize the state of the industry there? What advantages or disadvantages come with being based in Belgium? 

Ironically, less than 1% of our revenue comes from Belgium. It’s not an easy market, and it’s a relatively expensive place to be an entrepreneur. So why stay? Partly stubbornness, but mostly a strong sense of belonging and responsibility to help build a healthy local game-dev ecosystem. 

Rather than running from the challenges, we choose to lean in. We’re seen as “the old guys” in the Belgian scene, and the respect and warmth we get from the local dev community genuinely inspires us to give back. We organize informal local game-dev meetups, Belgian beer, a few hours of conversation, and a very low barrier to entry. We take care of the organization and the drinks; all we ask is that people show up and enjoy themselves. And they do. 

More recently, since January 2026, we bought a duplex apartment in our building and turned it into a cozy co-working space called “Spawn Point”. It now hosts around 15 startup and solo game developers, offering an affordable, inspiring place to work right in the heart of the city. From a pure business perspective, it barely makes sense; we run it more or less at break-even. But being surrounded by inspiring developers, close friends, and shared talent under one roof is incredibly powerful, and the value of that goes far beyond economics. 

All of this to say: we don’t ask what our local sector can do for us, we ask what we can do for the sector. We want to help shape it. We may be a small country with a small game scene, but there’s an incredible amount of talent and potential here, and we believe it’s worth investing in.

Can you talk about your approach to partnerships: whether with publishers, other studios, or technology providers? How important are these relationships to LuGus Studios' success, and how do you decide which collaborations are worth pursuing? 

Partnerships matter to us, but only when they feel natural. We want to work with people because both sides want to, not because anyone feels obligated. That goes both ways. 

Our collaborations reflect that mindset. Locally, we work closely with friends in our co-working space. At the same time, our network stretches far beyond Belgium. Just last week, we welcomed a drone manufacturing partner from China. We’re currently involved in a cross-border drone simulator research project with partners across the Benelux, and we have ongoing collaborations with teams in the US, Ukraine, the UAE, and beyond. It’s genuinely exciting. The Liftoff simulators are recognized and respected worldwide, and that trust opens doors we’re deeply grateful for.

LuGus Studios, Game Development Company

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

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