Digital showcases have become a cornerstone of the modern publishing landscape. From State of Play to Wholesome Direct to Indie Fan Fest, among many others, there’s one for every segment – and the Triple-I Initiative has become one of the most effectivel for indies. It was set up by French studio Evil Empire, which was born to keep Dead Cells going after the game’s original developer, Motion Twin, wanted to move on to new projects. Alongside working on the likes of The Rogue Prince of Persia and Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, the company puts together the 45-minute Triple-I initiative showcase every April.
“We did the first one to announce Rogue Prince of Persia,” says marketing director Bérenger Dupré. “Ubisoft trusted us to do that. When it was successful we were like, okay, I guess we have to keep doing it next year, but we won’t have anything to show so let’s do it for the others.”
The recipe is simple: 45 minutes, no hosts, good games, and a flat rate of $15k for one minute to cover operating costs. It seems to work: the data suggests it’s one of the more effective digital showcases in terms of getting bang for your buck. In 2025 “we had several games that made more than 100,000 wishlists only five days after the event,” says studio co-founder Benjamin Laulan. “We had 16 games out of 40 on the top trending games on Steam.” 2026’s instalment had a big impact too, according to GameDiscoverCo’s Simon Carless.
Behind the scenes, the company has built a platform for developers to submit builds, and a team of six staffers play and rate them and spend several weeks arguing over what should be included. “I assume it’s like a film festival when they go in a secret place and they argue,” says Dupré. The running order is then crafted to balance known hits that will bring large communities – previous highlights included the Slay The Spire 2 reveal – with unknown newcomers that those players might be interested in.
“It’s like creating the perfect tracklist for a wedding,” says Laulan. “The main goal is to create the biggest targeted audience possible for the type of games that we have to show.”
“This starts with huge communities… then we need to seduce Valve to give us that sweet, sweet front-page featuring, we definitely wouldn’t be as successful without it. So we have to consider Valve as a client, in a way.”
“On top of that, we’re making a show. So we need to create surprises and great moments. That’s where we take risks sometimes – bringing games from never-heard-about developers, but we feel it would be a great fit for this audience.” That isn’t always new titles; he points to Clover Pit, which Future Friends had previously announced but got an exposure boost from its Triple-I showing.
“We don’t care about the views that much. We care about the studio satisfaction.”
The final touch is giving guidance on the trailers themselves, which Laulan says few other showcases offer. Playing the games, says Dupré, means the team can identify the elements worth showing, and can advise devs to “highlight this feature because this is where the juice is and we know it might work in a live event.”
“Usually the first answer from the studios is like, ‘Fuck this guy,'” grins Laulan. “Which I would expect. I know how hard it can be when you work on a trailer. But we really want to work with studios to make the best out of their game… to make them understand this is a live event, there are codes to respect.” The goal is to create an emotional reaction that resonates with the audience.
The secret of the show, says Dupré, is “we don’t care about the views that much. We care about the studio satisfaction.” The key metric is the ratio of views to wishlists, because that’s the marketing team’s own metric for promoting their own games. The question, says Laulan, is “did we convert enough? Did we put the right game in front of the right people?”
“I personally care more about the comments over the views ratio,” says Dupré, “Having one million views but only 200 comments means that our show is not making people talk about it.”
They have no plans to expand the show, either. “Absolutely not,” says Dupré. “That’s the whole point.”
“It’s not even the work,” says Laulan. “It works the way it does because we don’t have a host, we don’t throw money at it to make it bigger. We want to give the players what they want, which is just ‘cool games’. And we don’t have to justify a price or our existence.”
There’s also the fact that Evil Empire has to juggle doing updates and hitting milestones in its own development work alongside putting on a digital showcase. The studio announced Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse in February while right in the middle of finalising the lineup for this year’s Triple-I Initiative. “It’s always chaotic,” Dupré says.
Shepherding other studios’ games
But being both a developer and a showcase organiser has its advantages. Through the Triple-I Initiative, Evil Empire met Blobfish, the studio behind Brotato, which was in a similar position to Motion Twin had been in with Dead Cells back in 2019. “They wanted to move on, but the community was still asking for more content,” Dupré explains.
“Ben was like: ‘We like Brotato, we’ve done this before’, so we pitched them some ideas. It took a few months to agree on a pitch and some content. We’re having a blast doing that. It gives us a creative framing with a game that is already there and successful. Our developers can just enjoy the moment because they have fun themselves, take care of the game and have a direct result.”
After several weeks of online discussions and a week-long meetup in Bordeaux, Blobfish signed over the live-ops for Brotato to Evil Empire.
“We spent one week aligning on the vision for the game, what the pillars of the game are, what they want us to respect at all costs, what our ambitions are, what we want to do, and what they don’t want to see at all,” Laulan explains. Despite taking over the day-to-day management of Brotato, Evil Empire doesn’t own the IP – that remains with Blobfish. The deal was based on revenue share around the new content Evil Empire provides.
Dupré says that because Evil Empire enjoys this kind of work, it is setting up a unit dedicated to managing live-ops for other companies’ games. In fact, the developer is on the lookout for games that are later in their lifecycle where the developers want to have the freedom to focus on new and more current things.
“They must feel that we love the game as much as their players do, and we’re here to make the party go on”
But the important point, Dupré adds, is that Evil Empire must be a fan of the game they’re taking on, because that passion will come across in the pitch to the game’s developer. “They must feel that we love the game as much as their players do, and we’re here to make the party go on, basically.”
Laulan says Evil Empire wants to be viewed as a safe pair of hands for other companies’ precious IPs. “It’s something we have the ambition to be recognised for: like, if I give my IP to these guys, I can tell that they will give so much love to it and care about it, not just slap it into a random game design.”
Original IP
So far, Evil Empire’s work has primarily been as a caretaker for other IPs. It started with Dead Cells, and since then the company has been the steward for Castlevania and Prince of Persia, as well as Brotato. But the firm also has dreams of creating its own, wholly original properties.
“We absolutely love working on other people’s IP,” Laulan says. “We don’t have this ego saying that we absolutely need to do our own IP, but it’s something we want to do at some point. It’s just that we felt like we need to really be sustainable first, really put down the foundations of the studio.” Working on Dead Cells helped with that, and Laulan notes that funding is much easier to access for existing IPs – which also tend to come with their own ready-made community.
“What Clair Obscur did, that we cannot do”
Dupré adds that having the pillars of an established IP helps during the pre-production process, and that Evil Empire isn’t quite ready to start from scratch with an ambitious, completely original IP. “What Clair Obscur did, that we cannot do.”
That said, the studio is exploring options with a view to doing something original further down the line. “We’re testing a few things,” Laulan says. “We’re not in a rush. Probably it won’t be for the next round of production. But it’s absolutely something we want to do.”
And as well as doing live-ops for older indie titles, Evil Empire is still looking to continue working on IP from other companies, as it has done with Castlevania and Prince of Persia. “As long as it resonates with the genres we’re good at,” grins Dupré. “Nobody wants to see a Fast and Furious roguelike game. Although… they keep dying and coming back. Maybe there’s something there.”
