At a time when AAA and independent studios are fighting to stay afloat, the team behind Deliver Us the Moon and its sequel isn’t prepared to go down without a fight. When sci-fi adventure sequel, Deliver Us Mars, first released in February, 2023, it didn’t take long for the Dutch developer that made it to deem it a creative and artistic success. Much bigger in scope than its predecessor – 2018’s Deliver Us the Moon – KeokeN Interactive wanted to offer players a surprisingly faithful depiction of the red planet to explore, complete with a greater focus on emotional family drama, puzzles, and of course, traversal.
As proud of the finished product studio heads Paul and Koen Deetman were, however, internally to their team, they were being totally honest about where the future of the studio may be headed. “We were very aware of how the situation in the game industry could be,” Koen explains. Over the course of development KeokeN Interactive had grown into a team of 45 developers – the biggest the studio had ever been – and always knew the risk of potentially needing to let people go, regardless of if the game performed according to expectations or not.
Both directors recognised that, even at the start of 2023, Deliver Us Mars would release into an incredibly volatile market. “These people, they knew that if they stepped in and finished the game above the core team, that they’d unfortunately be needed to be let go again,” corroborates Paul. “It was [mainly.
