Why Small Indie Game Studio are the future :

The games industry spent roughly two decades chasing scale. Bigger teams, bigger budgets, bigger worlds. The result was a generation of massive productions that left very little room for creative risk, with thousands of people working on individual components of something so large that no single person could hold the whole vision in their head at once.

Alexandre Amancio has lived that reality firsthand. As a former creative director at Ubisoft, he worked on titles including Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2, and was part of teams that reached a thousand people. Now he runs Studio Ellipsis in Lisbon, Portugal, and he joined
Dan Long on the IndieGameBusiness podcast to talk about why he believes the future of games belongs to smaller teams, what that actually looks like in practice, and what developers building studios today need to get right from the start.

From Physics to Ubisoft:

Alexandre’s path into games was anything but direct. He started studying physics and assumed that his creative side would remain a hobby. That changed when Jurassic Park came out and he saw what CGI was capable of. The idea that a filmmaker could reconstruct extinct animals through synthetic environments that looked genuinely real was enough to convince him to leave his physics program and enroll in a 3D modeling course.

Getting into games from there was not straightforward either. Montreal had no games industry at the time, so he started his career building flight simulators for commercial and military clients. When Ubisoft eventually opened a studio in Montreal, he applied and was rejected. He landed instead at a small indie studio, and he credits that experience as the foundation of everything that came after.

At that small studio, he had to do everything. There was no division of labor narrow enough to confine him to one task. He did art, design, writing, and whatever else needed doing. That breadth of exposure opened up the possibility of creative direction in a way that a specialized role at a large studio never would have. Eventually he did make it to Ubisoft, where he art directed Far Cry 2 and went on to creative direction work on Assassin’s Creed Revelations before Assassin’s Creed Unity.

The contrast between those two environments shaped how he thinks about team size and creative output in ways that still inform how he runs Studio Ellipsis today.

Why the Industry Hit a Saturation Point:

To understand why Alexandre believes smaller teams represent the future, it helps to understand how he reads the last twenty years of the industry’s history. The games business grew from a niche into a dominant entertainment industry. That growth was real and substantial, but it came with a side effect: the practices that developed during a boom period got treated as permanent best practices even after the conditions that created them changed.

The response to growth was to get bigger. Games became more expensive. The more expensive they became, the less risk anyone was willing to take, because the stakes attached to each release were too high to gamble on something unproven. Studios returned repeatedly to formulas that had worked before. The result was a plateau where technically impressive, enormously ambitious games existed in abundance, but genuinely original experiences became rare.

Players noticed. There are games so large you could spend years inside them. But after enough of those, players started looking for something different, something that felt surprising and personal rather than optimized and familiar. Alexandre’s observation is that those original experiences are currently coming from smaller studios with less to lose, teams that can afford to try something unusual because a failure does not cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

What a Team of a Thousand People Actually Feels Like:

Alexandre described his experience directing a game with a thousand people working on it, and the description is worth sitting with. His job at that scale felt less like creative direction and more like a stage magician running between spinning plates, catching whichever one was about to fall and giving it enough momentum to keep going before sprinting to the next.

The problem with that kind of work is not that the people involved are not talented. It is that at sufficient scale, a coherent creative vision becomes genuinely difficult to maintain. Work gets segmented. People own a piece of something and execute it well in isolation, but the connective tissue between those pieces, the sense that everything is part of a single unified thing, becomes harder and harder to preserve. The person who only animates fingers is very good at animating fingers, but may never fully understand how those fingers connect to the emotional experience the game is trying to create.

Smaller teams do not have that problem in the same way. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. When something needs to get done and no one else is going to pick it up, the person who notices it tends to handle it. The game becomes a living thing built collectively rather than assembled from parts. That intimacy at the production level tends to create intimacy in the product itself.

Creative Constraint as a Design Tool:

One of the most practically useful ideas Alexandre shared is the concept of creative constraint, which he treats not as a limitation but as a deliberate design tool. He described it as defining the lens through which every decision in a game gets evaluated.

The specific form this takes can vary. It might be the player fantasy, the central experience the game is built around. It might be a single defining question: what is this game fundamentally about? Whatever form it takes, having that anchor matters because game development involves an enormous number of decisions made under conditions of constant change. Without a fixed reference point, even smart people with good instincts will get roughly half of those decisions wrong, simply because there are too many shifting variables to track without something to align toward.

With a clear creative constraint established, decisions become faster and more coherent. You hold each choice up to the lens and ask whether it fits. The decisions that do not fit get cut or reworked. The decisions that do fit reinforce the game’s identity. Over time, that coherence is what separates games that feel intentional from games that feel like a collection of features that never quite added up to something.

He was careful to say this does not require having every detail planned out in advance. The constraint is not a detailed design document. It is a high-level understanding of what the game is and what experience it is trying to create. Everything else can remain exploratory, as long as exploration keeps returning to that anchor.

How to Think About Game Festivals When You Are Just Starting Out:

A question came in during the live session from a small studio about to show their first game publicly. They asked whether it made more sense to start with smaller regional festivals to build credibility before approaching larger ones like IGF, or whether it was worth targeting the bigger events directly.

Alexandre’s answer was honest about the limits of general advice here: both approaches can work, and the right answer depends on the specific game, what the studio has to show, and what outcome they are trying to create. He has seen studios go the regional route and build momentum gradually. He has also seen studios go directly to a major festival and create real noise with their first appearance. Neither path is universally correct.

His actual recommendation was to trust your own instincts more than external frameworks. The developer who built the game knows the game better than anyone giving advice from the outside. The quiet internal voice that is already leaning toward one answer or the other is usually reading the situation more accurately than the louder voices of received wisdom about what the correct strategy should be.

What Alexandre Would Tell Developers Starting Out Today:

• Remember that you are making games for a living, and that means fun is not optional. When pressure builds, when money gets tight, when things are not going the way you expected, the developers who keep a connection to why they got into this work in the first place tend to navigate those periods better than those who lose it.
• Know your creative constraint before you go deep into production. You do not need to have every system mapped out. But you do need to know what your game is at a fundamental level, what experience it is creating and for whom. That clarity will protect you from a significant amount of rework and help your team make consistent decisions even when you are not in the room.
• Accept that exploring novelty means accepting iteration. If you are genuinely trying to create something that has not been done before, you will have to try things that do not work and redo things that seemed right but were not. That is not a failure of process. It is what the process of finding something new actually looks like. The goal is not to avoid that iteration but to use your creative constraint to make sure the iteration stays pointed in the right direction.

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Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Alexandre and other industry pros.

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Building MeetToMatch and Game Industry Networking – A Conversation With Fedor van Herpen:

Some of the most useful businesses in the games industry did not start with a grand vision. They started with someone trying to solve an immediate, practical problem. That is more or less the origin story of MeetToMatch, the matchmaking platform that has become a fixture of major games industry conferences around the world.

Fedor van Herpen, one of MeetToMatch‘s co-founders, joined Jay Powell on the IndieGameBusiness podcast for a candid conversation about how the platform came to be, what the acquisition by ONESP means for the company’s future, how conferences have shifted since COVID, and what developers need to understand about networking and pitching in the current market.

How MeetToMatch Started From an Intern and a Spreadsheet:

Fedor did not plan to be in the games industry. His original goal was a corporate internship at Shell, the oil company. When that fell through, he scrambled to find something else and landed at a Dutch conference called the Festival of Games in Utrecht. He went in with no expectations and found that he genuinely liked the work.

The problem he encountered there was a familiar one for anyone who has tried to coordinate meetings at a large event. The first year the conference attempted to facilitate networking between attendees, they did it in an Excel spreadsheet. It did not go well. Fedor and his eventual co-founder Ansgar, who was his manager at the time, built a matchmaking platform to replace the spreadsheet and solve the problem properly.

That solution became MeetToMatch. Years later, Ansgar and Fedor are still running it together, with Ansgar occasionally reminding Fedor that he used to be the intern. The platform has since become one of the standard tools used at major games conferences to connect developers, publishers, investors, and service providers.

The ONESP Acquisition and What It Actually Changed:

Earlier this year, MeetToMatch was acquired by ONESP, which stands for One Shared Passion. ONESP is a group of companies focused on games and consumer technology, with operations spanning PR and marketing, VR development, retail marketing, and influencer management. The acquisition took MeetToMatch from a team of ten to being part of a five hundred person organization.

Fedor was candid about what that transition has and has not changed. The day to day operation of MeetToMatch remains largely the same. ONESP has been hands off, telling Fedor and his team to keep running the business and focus on growth. What has genuinely shifted is the access to people and ideas. Directors from other companies within the group reach out regularly now with collaboration proposals or requests for help. And perhaps more importantly, Fedor and Ansgar are no longer two founders on an island when they need to think through a difficult decision. They now have a network of other company leaders within ONESP they can speak to in confidence.

That shift from isolated ownership to being part of a broader organization, while still retaining operational control, is a meaningful change for anyone who has run a small company. The business decisions are still theirs, but the support structure around those decisions is significantly deeper.

How Game Industry Conferences Changed After COVID:

Jay asked Fedor to reflect on how the conference and event market has evolved from pre-pandemic to now, and the answer was more nuanced than a simple return to normal.

On attendee behavior, Fedor said things look largely the same as pre-pandemic. People want to meet in person. Virtual conferences, which had a genuine moment during the COVID years, have largely lost their appeal now that in-person events are accessible again. The appetite for online-only professional events has dropped significantly.

What has changed is the type of event people prefer. Fedor observed that attendees are gravitating toward smaller, more intimate conferences over the massive shows. The big events still have value, particularly for building broad visibility and meeting a wide range of contacts in a short period. But the preference for focused, relationship-driven gatherings has grown noticeably.

He also noted that the business model around conferences has shifted. Sponsors are more cautious and more selective. They are not writing checks for conferences just to have their name attached. They want to see clear evidence of return on investment. This has created real pressure on conference organizers, who have to demonstrate value to sponsors in concrete terms rather than relying on the general goodwill and promotional instincts that used to drive sponsorship decisions.

The Real Value of In-Person Networking for Indie Developers:

One of the most instructive parts of the conversation was the dynamic between Jay and Fedor themselves. Jay told Fedor on the podcast that MeetToMatch had effectively ended one of his early business lines. He and his team used to be hired by government agencies and other organizations to coordinate their meetings at GDC and Gamescom. When MeetToMatch became widely used, the need for that service evaporated.

Rather than any tension in that story, it illustrated something important about how the games industry actually operates at the conference level. Jay’s reaction at the time was not frustration but pragmatism: why would anyone pay for something that a better tool now does automatically? That kind of honest market assessment is what professional networking in this industry tends to look like.

The conversation also touched on what makes games industry networking distinct. Fedor and Jay described a culture where developers, publishers, and service providers are genuinely rooting for the broader industry to succeed. A developer without a publishing deal is more likely to be pointed toward a publisher that is a good fit than to be left without help. There is competitive tension at the business level, but at the conference floor level, the prevailing attitude is collaborative.

That culture is part of what makes the games conference circuit worth investing in for indie developers. It is not a scene where you are competing against everyone in the room. It is one where most people in the room have some interest in seeing good games find their audience.

When Should Developers Start Submitting Games to Festivals and Events?:

A question came in during the live session from the IndieGameBusiness Discord asking about the right moment to submit a game to festivals and what level of polish those events actually expect. Both Fedor and Jay addressed it directly.

Fedor’s position was that developers need at minimum a playable demo or vertical slice, something that lets people experience the core game loop with actual design in place. Not placeholder art, not a prototype held together with concept sketches, but something that communicates what the game actually is and feels like to play.

Jay added an important distinction between two different audiences: publishers and investors on one hand, and the public on the other. A build that crashes or has visible bugs can be acceptable when you are showing it to a publisher or investor who understands the development process and can look past surface issues to evaluate the core concept. The same build shown to players at a public event is a different situation entirely. Your audience at a public showcase does not have the context to look past instability. They need something that is fun and stable enough to represent the game honestly.

His overall recommendation was to submit often, across the many events and festivals available throughout the year on and off Steam. The opportunity to get your game in front of people is too valuable to wait for perfection. But whatever you submit publicly needs to have a genuinely fun core loop and be stable enough that it does not damage the impression a player forms in those first few minutes with the game.

What Happens When Developers Acquire Existing IP:

The second Discord question touched on acquiring intellectual property from an original creator, which is a situation that comes up more often than many developers expect, particularly with retro or dormant game properties.

Fedor’s core point was that when you take on existing IP, the audience attached to that IP comes with it and brings expectations. The new game needs to respect what players loved about the original property. If your reimagined version strips out the elements that defined the original and only keeps the name and visual brand, you have the IP but you do not have the goodwill that was supposed to come with it.

Jay reinforced this from the publishing perspective. There are many examples of classic games being relaunched or reimagined that bear little resemblance to what made the original work. Players who show up for a beloved IP and find that the new version has discarded everything they cared about do not become fans of the new game. They become critics of it. If you are going to acquire and build on existing IP, faithfulness to the core experience of the original is not optional.

The Broader Case for Conferences as a Business Tool:

One thread running through the entire conversation was that conferences, done right, are not just networking opportunities. They are a place where real business relationships form over time, where candid conversations happen that would not happen over email, and where the informal moments often produce more value than the scheduled meetings.

Fedor and Jay’s own friendship is a product of years of showing up at the same events. They have competed for the same contracts without animosity, supported each other through difficult periods in their businesses, and built the kind of trust that only comes from repeated in-person contact over a long time.

For indie developers trying to find publishers, investors, co-developers, or simply mentors who have navigated similar challenges, that model of sustained conference presence is worth taking seriously. A single GDC or Gamescom trip is rarely transformative. But a developer who shows up consistently, has something worth showing, and treats every conversation as a long-term relationship investment will build a network that pays off in ways that are hard to manufacture any other way.

Where to Find MeetToMatch:

MeetToMatch is available through the conferences and events that use the platform for attendee matchmaking. Developers looking to get the most out of their conference presence can use MeetToMatch to pre-schedule meetings and identify the right contacts before they arrive, rather than spending the first day of an event figuring out who they need to talk to.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Fedor and other industry pros.

Level up your indie gaming journey! Don’t miss out on the latest IndieGameBusiness® podcasts – sign up for our newsletter today and stay tuned for upcoming episodes, Discord events, industry news, and more. Stay in the loop – Subscribe now!

Why Indies Should Care About Web Gaming:

Most indie developers think about Steam. Some think about mobile. Very few think about the web, and that gap represents a real missed opportunity that Romy Halfweeg, a developer relations specialist at Poki, laid out clearly on the Indie Game Business podcast with host Dan Long.
Poki is the current market leader in web gaming, with 90 million monthly players and 100 billion gameplays each month. That is not a niche audience. That is a platform with serious reach, and most indie developers are not paying attention to it.

What Poki Is and Why Web Gaming Is Growing:

Poki is a Dutch company based in Amsterdam. It operates poki.com, a platform where players can play HTML5 games directly in the browser, no download required, no account needed. Poki made the switch from Flash to HTML5 in 2015, three years before the Flash shutdown in 2018, which put them in a strong position when the rest of the web scrambled to catch up.

Beyond dedicated gaming platforms, HTML5 games are being integrated into apps and services that were never primarily about gaming. WeChat in China has built gaming into its all-in-one app. A banking app in Korea lets players run a quick game while waiting for a payment to process. DiDi, China’s ride-hailing app, offers players an HTML5 game while they wait for their car to arrive.

The growth is being driven by a younger audience that is used to instant access to content. Downloading an app, watching an ad, and then trying a game is not how this generation consumes content. They expect to click a link and be playing within seconds. Browser games fit that expectation perfectly.

Is Web Gaming Actually Right for Your Game?:

Romy was direct about this: web gaming is not the right fit for every developer or every game. Before you port anything or start a new project for the web, you need to be honest about what you are making.

Web gaming is a strong fit if your game has these characteristics:

• Simple, accessible mechanics that players can grasp within seconds
• Short session lengths, where a player can get value from a two to five minute play
• Low file size that loads quickly in a browser
• Broad genre appeal such as casual, arcade, puzzle, idle, or hyper-casual
• No need for extended narrative, complex controls, or deep progression systems

Web gaming is a poor fit if your game requires:

• Elaborate story systems or narrative depth
• Complex control schemes that do not translate to browser play
• Long session investment before the player gets value
• Heavy file sizes that create slow load times

If your concept requires players to commit significant time and attention before it pays off, the web audience will not wait for that. They will click away within the first few minutes.

How Much Money Can Indie Developers Actually Make on Web?:

This is the question every developer wants a real answer to, and Romy gave one. The honest version is that revenue on web depends heavily on genre, update frequency, and how long the game has been live. But for a first web game, developers can realistically expect somewhere between five hundred and three thousand dollars per month.

That is not the same ceiling as a breakout Steam release. A hit game on Steam can generate millions in a matter of months. On web, hitting that level takes longer and typically requires multiple successful games building a cumulative audience over time.

The revenue model on platforms like Poki is advertising-based. Developers earn through revenue share on ads shown during gameplay, which means:

• High session time drives higher revenue
• Games that retain players and get replayed accumulate more ad impressions
• Genre matters significantly, since casual games tend to have higher replay rates than single-run experiences
• Updates that bring players back extend the earning period of a game

Poki also offers licensing deals, where they pay a developer upfront or on an ongoing basis to have a game exclusively or primarily on their platform. These deals are not publicly standardized, but they represent an option beyond pure ad revenue share for games that Poki wants to feature prominently.

What Poki Actually Looks for When Reviewing Games:

Romy explained that Poki reviews every game submitted to their platform before it goes live. They are not running an open marketplace where anything gets published. The team plays the game and evaluates it against a set of standards that prioritize player experience.

The things that matter most to Poki during review:

• Retention: Do players stay? Do they come back? This is the single most important metric.
• First-session experience: Can a player understand and enjoy the game within the first three minutes without dying or failing?
• File size: Games need to load fast. Large files are a dealbreaker for browser-based audiences.
• Polish: The game should feel complete, not like a prototype. That does not mean it needs to be complex, but what is there should feel intentional and finished.
• Mobile compatibility: Poki’s audience plays significantly on mobile browsers, so touch controls matter.

On the retention point, Romy stressed that the first three minutes of a game are critical. Players who die or fail within those first minutes will not stick around to give the game another chance. They will simply move on to the next one. The web audience has no patience for a steep early learning curve.

Her specific advice: in the first three minutes, players should not be able to die. Hand-holding at the start is not a design weakness for web games, it is a necessity. Once a player is past that initial window and has decided they like the game, difficulty can increase. But during those first few minutes, the game should be convincing the player to stay, not punishing them for being new.

The File Size Problem Most Developers Underestimate:

One of the most practical pieces of advice Romy shared is something developers often overlook until it becomes a problem: file size.

The web audience expects instant play. If a game takes more than a few seconds to load, a significant portion of potential players will leave before they ever see the title screen. This is not a user experience preference, it is a behavioral pattern baked into how people use the web.

• Keep total game file size under 30 MB where possible
• Optimize all assets aggressively before export
• Test load times on a standard connection, not just your developer machine
• Prioritize loading the core gameplay loop first so players can start playing before all assets are fully loaded if possible

Audience Demographics and What They Tell You About Game Design:

Romy described some of the audience behaviors and preferences that affect what games succeed on the platform:

• The audience is accustomed to short-form content and instant gratification. Games that deliver fun quickly outperform games that require setup time.
• Girl-skewing audiences on Poki respond well to creativity and self-expression. Dress-up games, character customization, and games with no win condition but open creative space perform well with this segment.
• Multiplayer games benefit significantly from avatar customization. Players want to express themselves and be recognized within the game.
• Puzzle games work on web, but not overly complex ones. The puzzle difficulty curve should stay accessible for longer than it might on a platform where the audience has made a deliberate, high-investment choice to be there.

Understanding the audience means understanding that web players have not necessarily decided they want to play a game when they land on it. Many of them arrived through a link, a search, or a recommendation and are still deciding whether to commit. The game has to earn that commitment quickly.

Where Web Gaming Is Headed:

Romy’s view on the near future of web gaming is that the pattern already visible in 2024 and 2025 will continue and accelerate. More platforms and apps will integrate HTML5 games as a natural part of their user experience, not as a gaming product but as a utility. Games to fill waiting time, games embedded in apps, games triggered by real-world events like being on hold with customer service or waiting for a delivery.

At the same time, dedicated web gaming platforms like Poki and Crazy Games will continue to grow a player base that comes specifically to play games on the web. Romy sees the space splitting into two distinct player types:

• Players who encounter games incidentally through apps and platforms where gaming is not the primary purpose
• Players who seek out web gaming specifically and want a deeper, more intentional experience from a dedicated platform

Both represent audiences for indie developers. The first group rewards ultra-simple, frictionless games that require no context to enjoy. The second group is more willing to invest time in a game that has more going on, as long as the first-session experience is still smooth.

The international angle is worth noting for developers thinking about reach. Poki’s 90 million monthly players are globally distributed. Web games are inherently cross-platform and cross-region in a way that app store games are not. A game that performs on Poki has potential reach across markets that would require significant localization and platform investment to access through traditional publishing routes.

Practical Advice for Your First Web Game:

If you are building your first web game, Romy’s advice is consistent and practical: start small, keep the scope tight, and treat it as a learning exercise.

The bar to publish on web is lower than on Steam or in app stores, not in terms of quality, but in terms of what constitutes a complete experience. A game built around a single mechanic that is executed well is a legitimate web game. You do not need secondary gameplay loops, a progression system, or a narrative arc for a web game to succeed.

Key principles for your first web game:

• Build something you can finish in a month or less
• Focus on one core mechanic and make it feel good
• Add game feel through juice: effects, sound, responsive feedback when buttons are pressed or actions happen
• Make sure the first three minutes do not punish the player
• Keep file size as small as possible
• Test on mobile before you submit
• Ship a version that works, then update it based on player data

The Bottom Line for Indie Developers:

Web gaming is not a replacement for Steam or mobile. It is its own platform with its own audience, its own standards, and its own revenue model. For developers who build the right kind of game, it represents a real distribution channel with 90 million monthly players and significantly less competition than established stores.

The barrier to entry is lower than most other platforms, both technically and in terms of what the audience expects from a first release. A small, polished, fast-loading game built around a single strong mechanic has a genuine shot at finding an audience on the web.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Romy and other industry pros.

Level up your indie gaming journey! Don’t miss out on the latest IndieGameBusiness® podcasts – sign up for our newsletter today and stay tuned for upcoming episodes, Discord events, industry news, and more. Stay in the loop – Subscribe now!

Indie Game Press Coverage

Getting Indie Game Press Coverage is one of the most common pain points for indie game developers. You’ve spent months or years building something you believe in, you send out press kits, and then nothing. No reviews, no previews, no mentions. Meanwhile, games that seem less polished are landing features on major outlets. What’s going on?

On a recent episode of the Indie Game Business podcast, host Dan Long sat down with Mike Straw of Insider Gaming for a candid conversation about how games media actually works, what journalists are looking for, and the specific things developers do that quietly kill their chances of getting coverage. Mike has been in games media for sixteen years and has worked his way from freelance writing to managing editorial roles, and he brought a refreshingly honest perspective to a topic that a lot of developers struggle to find straight answers on.

How Games Media Actually Decides What Gets Published:

One of the first things Mike addressed is something many developers assume but rarely understand clearly: the metrics behind coverage decisions. A lot of indie studios think there’s a data-driven formula, some algorithm that editors run press kits through to decide what’s worth their time. The reality is messier and, in some ways, more encouraging.

Large outlets do look at traffic data and audience interest, but individual journalists often have significant editorial latitude. Mike explained that he personally picks games he’s genuinely interested in covering alongside titles he knows will resonate with Insider Gaming’s audience. His audience skews toward extraction shooters, story games, and action RPGs, so he weights his selections accordingly. But he also reserves space for games that speak to him personally, including his love of roguelikes and turn-based strategy.

What this means for developers is that coverage isn’t purely a numbers game. A journalist’s personal taste and editorial instincts matter. Your goal isn’t just to hit metrics; it’s to connect with the right person who genuinely wants to tell your story.

The Single Biggest Mistake Developers Make With Press Outreach:

When asked directly what kills coverage opportunities, Mike’s answer was immediate: being unresponsive.

This might sound obvious, but it’s far more common than developers realize. A studio will send out a press blast, generate genuine interest from a journalist, and then go silent when that journalist follows up with a question or request. By the time the developer responds a week later, the story window has closed. Games journalism runs on timing. If a journalist can’t get the clarity they need quickly, they move on to something they can actually publish.

Mike put it plainly: when developers send out a press blast, they should expect people to email them back. If you’re not ready to be responsive to media inquiries, you’re not ready to run a press campaign. Responsiveness signals respect for the journalist’s time, and journalists notice when studios take that seriously.

Beyond responsiveness, having a solid press kit matters. But the press kit alone won’t carry you. Journalists work with dozens of press kits at any given time. What separates the games that get coverage from those that don’t often comes down to the relationship and communication around the kit, not just the assets inside it.

Why Your Story Matters More Than Your Trailer:

One of the most valuable things Mike shared is how much story drives coverage decisions, particularly for indie games. He talked about covering Steam Next Fest and how he approaches game selection. Even for games outside his personal taste, he’s looking for something that his audience will connect with. But more than that, he’s looking for games with a story worth telling.

He mentioned games currently out that aren’t getting the traction he believes they deserve, and how the upcoming Insider Gaming showcase is being built specifically to spotlight titles that need publisher support or funding to cross the finish line. The common thread in coverage he wants to do is the story behind the game, the context, the people making it, and the creative risks being taken.

This is where many indie developers miss an opportunity. A press kit has screenshots and a trailer. What it often lacks is a compelling narrative about why this game exists, what problem it’s solving, what risk the developer took that nobody else was willing to take. That narrative is what Mike is actually looking for when he decides whether to pitch a feature to his team.

He also made a pointed observation about where storytelling is succeeding right now on platforms like YouTube Shorts. The content that performs isn’t the polished, hook-optimized stuff. It’s developers telling an actual story about something in their game, a character, a mechanic, an unexpected moment during development. The human element is what cuts through.

The AI Problem in Games Media and What It Means for Developers:

Dan asked Mike about AI in games journalism, and the response was candid. Mike said the threat is real and something he thinks about seriously. AI tools are scraping content, misrepresenting quotes while still sourcing outlets, and showing up in search results in ways that pull traffic away from the journalists who did the original reporting. It’s not a hypothetical threat; it’s already affecting outlets.

But there’s a counterweight. Audiences are pushing back on AI-generated content. When Metacritic briefly hosted an AI-generated review for Resident Evil Requiem, the backlash was swift enough that Metacritic not only pulled the review but removed the outlet entirely. That kind of public reaction gives Mike some confidence that authentic journalism still has a strong place, but it also means journalists need to work harder to find angles and stories that AI aggregation can’t replicate.

For indie developers, this dynamic is actually good news. AI content farms can package up news about big-budget titles easily. What they can’t do is tell the specific, personal story of why a small studio in some city made a weird, risky game that shouldn’t work but somehow does. That kind of story requires a journalist who cares, and there are still plenty of those.

Why Taking Creative Risks Helps You Get Covered:

Mike closed the episode with a message directed at developers, speaking as a gamer rather than a journalist. He said flat out that indie games are keeping the industry alive because they’re the ones still willing to take risks. Big publishers optimize for safety. Indie studios are where the genuinely experimental stuff happens.

From a press coverage standpoint, this matters because risk creates story. A game that tries something no one else is trying is a game worth writing about. A safe, polished clone of an already-popular genre gives a journalist nothing interesting to say. When you make a bold creative choice, you’re not just making a better game. You’re giving a writer something to work with.

Mike’s specific advice: don’t play it safe. This wasn’t abstract encouragement. It was rooted in his experience that the stories he most wants to tell are the ones where a developer did something unexpected, something that required courage to ship. Those are the games he gets excited to cover, and that excitement comes through in the coverage.

What the Insider Gaming Showcase Tells Us About What Journalists Actually Want to Amplify:

Mike shared details about the first-ever Insider Gaming showcase, scheduled for May 28, which received nearly three hundred submissions and ultimately selected fifty-four games. The curation criteria are worth paying attention to: no games with large publisher backing, no hundred-million-dollar budgets. The showcase is exclusively for games that need funding or publisher support to reach their next milestone.

This is a direct signal about what Mike and his team believe in. They’re building a platform specifically to serve the games that get overlooked by traditional press cycles. Several of the fifty-four selected titles are already out but not getting the attention they warrant. Others are still in early development and looking for Kickstarter support or investor interest.

The goal is to run it twice a year, continually surfacing games that most players have never heard of. For developers wondering whether press is still accessible to small studios without PR budgets, initiatives like this one are evidence that there are journalists actively building structures to cover exactly those games.

How to Actually Get on a Journalist’s Radar:

So what should developers actually do differently? Based on everything Mike shared, a few practical patterns stand out.

First, build your press campaign around a story, not just assets. Before you send anything to a journalist, be able to answer the question: why does this game exist? What would have been lost if you hadn’t made it? What creative risk did you take that the market told you not to? Those answers are the foundation of a story worth covering.

Second, when you send outreach, be ready to respond the same day. Treat incoming journalist emails the way you’d treat a message from a potential publisher. If someone is interested enough to follow up, that interest is perishable. Every day you don’t respond is a day closer to them moving on.

Third, know which outlets actually cover games like yours. Insider Gaming’s audience, as Mike described it, leans toward action games and extraction shooters. If you’re making a farming sim or a narrative adventure, that outlet might not be the right fit, and sending to the wrong press contact wastes everyone’s time. Do the research before you build the list.

Fourth, don’t overlook journalists who cover adjacent topics. Mike came from sports media and stumbled into games coverage because of personal passion. Some of the most enthusiastic coverage for indie games comes from writers who aren’t assigned to the beat but find a title that genuinely excites them. Those organic discoveries often lead to better, more personal coverage than a targeted pitch to a senior games editor.

Burnout Is Real in Journalism Too, and It Affects Coverage:

One of the more unexpected threads in the conversation was Mike’s openness about burnout. After twelve years in the industry, including six years as managing editor at Sports Gamers Online, he hit a wall. He stepped away entirely, tried something different, and was eventually pulled back by a conversation with Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming about the gaps he saw in existing games coverage.

What brought him back wasn’t money or obligation. It was a specific editorial vision: fewer filler articles, more in-depth features and deep-dive reporting where readers could actually learn something. He came back with a renewed sense of what he wanted games journalism to be.

This matters for developers because it’s a reminder that the people on the other end of your press outreach are human beings who care deeply about the quality of their work. Journalists who have fought through burnout to stay in the field are usually there because they love the craft of storytelling. A pitch that respects that, that gives them real material to work with rather than a bullet-pointed feature list, will always land better than one that treats them like a distribution channel.

The Bottom Line for Devs Seeking Indie Game Press Coverage:

Indie Game Press Coverage is genuinely achievable, but it requires thinking about journalism the way journalists think about it. Not as a slot to fill or a checkbox in a marketing plan, but as a collaboration between a storyteller and someone who has a story worth telling.

Mike Straw’s perspective from sixteen years in the industry comes down to a few core things: be reachable, have a real story, take creative risks that give journalists something interesting to say, and understand that the journalists who will give your game the best coverage are the ones who actually want to be there writing about it.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on May 27th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Mike and other industry pros.

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