Necrosoft Games was running out of money. At the rate things were going, the video game studio’s director, Brandon Sheffield, surmised that the company would be broke before its current project, a Persona -like RPG called Demonschool , shipped in September. This was in March, and prospects were looking glum.
The funding climate for video games was dangerously bad , especially for small projects, and layoffs seemed to happen at studios across the industry almost weekly. Then, a Hail Mary: Sheffield, an industry veteran with over a decade of experience, was able to secure a contract for Necrosoft to do some work on another game. It wasn’t an ideal situation—the studio would have to do the work while also finishing Demonschool —but a necessary one.
“It was the only way to survive, because nobody was funding anything,” he says. “It's also better than what's happening to a lot of people, where they just have to fold.” The studio’s troubles are hardly unique .
After a harsh year of layoffs in 2023, GamesIndustry.biz reported in January that company heads were already eyeing 2024 as “the year of closures.” After a boom in hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic, things cooled off, and now many game developers say mismanagement is making things worse.
Avenues smaller developers could once rely on for cash, like offering their games as exclusives on the Epic Games Store or Microsoft Game Pass, are no longer open. In March, Chris Bourassa, director of Slay the Spire d.