So, what does sustainability mean to us at Stupendium Softworks?
For one thing, it isn’t a corporate buzzword. It’s a core pillar of our development ethos, one that underpins every decision we make and shapes everything we create. It informs not just the games we build, but how we build them, who we build them with, and the kind of studio we want to be for years to come.
In the current economic climate, the games industry is, for lack of a better phrase, royally screwed.
Investor-driven growth has pushed development costs ever higher, while hardware prices continue to climb. The AI boom has driven up the cost of components like RAM, making consoles more expensive, and at the same time many large studios have used AI investment as justification for laying off thousands of highly skilled developers.
The tragedy is that both of these trends are poisoning the very well the industry drinks from. Games are becoming increasingly expensive for players to buy, while experienced developers are leaving an industry that has repeatedly shown it is unwilling to invest in their long-term careers or wellbeing. Every wave of layoffs takes decades of hard-earned knowledge and mentorship with it, and rebuilding that expertise is far harder than cutting it from a balance sheet.
An industry built on creativity cannot afford to treat either its players or its developers as disposable.
Development budgets have spiralled out of control. AAA games are burning through money at an astonishing rate, with hundreds of millions of dollars riding on launch day and enormous expectations for player numbers. When those expectations aren’t met, games can be written off as failures almost overnight, regardless of their quality. Just look at Concord or Highguard as examples of games that barely even got to breathe before they were shuttered.
Meanwhile, estimates put GTA 6’s budget somewhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. That’s more than the annual GDP of some small countries, which is a frankly absurd sentence to be able to write.
It’s not just the AAA space, either. Indie budgets have ballooned too, with projects increasingly measured in millions rather than tens of thousands. Across every tier of the industry, the cost of making games has never been higher.
So, what are we doing differently? Why are we sustainable? What are we doing that others aren’t?
Lets take a look at the pillar I wrote about a year and a half ago when we first started thinking about starting a studio:
We design our games with a forward-thinking approach; every system, feature, and model we create is built with adaptability in mind. By considering their potential for future reuse, we lay the groundwork for long-term sustainability. We don’t create massive games, instead we focus on making games that are budget-friendly, play to our strengths, and build upon what we’ve already accomplished.
– Stupendium Softworks Company Pillar #3
We’re currently working on our first title, a survival horror sandbox game. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: it wasn’t the first game Stupes and I pitched to each other.. in fact we explored several other ideas before landing on this one, and the deciding factor was purely financial.
I’ve said since day one that I never want Stupendium Softworks to spend more than £300,000 on a single project. If we ever find ourselves crossing that line, something has probably gone wrong. We’ve either let the scope creep beyond our control or convinced ourselves that bigger automatically means better. Neither is a healthy place to be, and so our third pillar is there to help remind us of that.
Keeping our budgets lean means keeping our risks manageable – it means we don’t need millions of sales just to survive. The added benefit is that can make games for the audience that wants them, rather than desperately chasing the biggest audience possible and building a homogenised product that has no edges to it.
So what was the logic of choosing our current project over the other ones?
The plan is that every system we build today becomes the foundation for the next one, and so on, ad-infinitum.
The work we’re doing on this game isn’t just for this game. The character controller, interaction systems, AI behaviours, saving, tools and art pipelines are all investments. Once they’re built, tested and proven in the heat of battle, we don’t have to build them again. Instead, we can spend that time and money making the next game better.
That creates a compounding effect: every project leaves the studio stronger than it found it. Development gets faster, our tools get more robust, and we spend less time reinventing the wheel – which is unfortunately something I see larger studios doing again and again.
With this sustainability in mind, we lay the groundwork for a studio that doesn’t overspend, that makes smart reuse of its existing codebase, and that isn’t obsessed with growth for growths sake.
With each new game, we can add more to our repertoire. If we can spend this project teaching a character how to walk, run and jump, then next time we can spend that time teaching them something new.
Like climbing a ladder (god forbid).
