Often when a studio is dropped by a major publisher, it leaves them in dire straits. The story is all too common and often ends in layoffs or outright closure.
Not so for Guildford-based Glowmade. The company’s online multiplayer title King of Meat shut down earlier this year as part of Amazon Game Studios’ shifting focus. The developer’s co-founder and studio head, Jonny Hopper, tells GamesIndustry.biz that the split was “very amicable”.
Glowmade owns all of its IP, and Hopper says that the studio was careful not to burn through the tech and retail giant’s money while the partnership was in effect, leaving it with a war chest to fund it through the coming years.
In fact, Hopper believes that Glowmade is in the strongest position it has ever been in as a company. “We’ve got a great team. We’ve got money in the bank. We’ve got financial independence, and we’ve got a team who know how to ship games,” he says. “That is a really strong position for anyone to be in. I’m not sitting here worrying how I’m going to pay people. They’re outside of my office making cool stuff for me. That’s a really nice place to be.”
Hopper says that the company was “responsible” with the money Amazon gave it, trying to balance paying Glowmade’s staff good salaries and providing benefits while also looking to the future.
“You need to think about what’s the business long-term, what happens if you get an absolute rug pull?” he says. “We weren’t necessarily expecting it because I think everyone wants their game to succeed. But when that does happen, you don’t need to freak out because you’ve been planning for this. That’s why we’re actually in a really strong position right now.”
With King of Meat and Amazon in the rearview mirror, Glowmade has been working on a new title, a single-player game called Rogue Fortune that marries a Hades-esque roguelike with a Tetris-inspired inventory management puzzle game. The baseline replayability of main game pairs with the variety offered by the inventory management: picking up Tetris-piece relics and slotting them into the player board in different combinations grants the player different powers and abilities, to often extreme effect.
“The exciting bit is when players play this and they go, oh man, I’ve broken the game because I’ve suddenly got massively overpowered,” grins Hopper. “The point is you’re supposed to become walking Armageddon as you go around, and everything’s on fire and exploding and the bad guys are all fighting each other because you cast a spell on them.” The branching options are what elevates the replayability beyond the procedurally-generated maps, and after the player’s inevitable death – this is a roguelike, after all – levels, unlocks and weapons persist.
Development started in January – a month before Amazon announced the King of Meat shutdown – with a deliberately limited scope.
“I sent quite a small prototype team off at the start of the year and said: ‘Let’s see what we can come up with in this kind of space, but you can’t have any artists’,” Hopper explains. “There were no artists on the team for about three months because we wanted them to just absolutely focus on mechanics and building out this kind of idea.”
Rogue Fortune is the polar opposite to King of Meat by design. Glowmade’s previous project was originally pitched in 2020 targeting a September 2021 release date. “Obviously that didn’t happen,” Hopper laughs (the game eventually launched in October 2025). Rogue Fortune was announced at Gamescom 2026, and Glowmade is targeting a 2027 release date.
“The idea is that this is a palate cleanser; how can we do something that’s really fun that we’re really interested in, but also not make it take forever or cost the earth,” Hopper continues. “When we started out this process, I said to the team: ‘Let’s build an idea that we can do in 12 months’. That wasn’t necessarily because I wanted to do it in 12 months, because things always take longer than that, but it’s more like constraining the thinking and giving those constraints and focusing the mind on we’re not going to build an MMO or something enormous. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to try and have a small idea that will obviously expand a little bit.”
Amazon told Glowmade at the start of 2026 that King of Meat was going to be shut down. Hopper and the rest of management told the team internally at that point, meaning that the studio could “rapidly start changing our focus”.
“It was definitely a bit bumpy because we’ve come off the high of finishing a game, shipping it, and then having to deal with these lows,” Hopper admits. “This is life and this is the game industry at the moment, unfortunately. But you can’t afford to sit around doing nothing, twiddling your thumbs and feeling sorry for yourself. You’ve got to go: what are we going to do now? What have we learned?”
“We’ve learned so much. We’ve got a team now that has shipped a game, that itself is a huge achievement. They know what they’re doing and that is a huge tick box for all the team. We know what we’re good at, we know what we’re not good at. We know what we can achieve and what we should try and avoid. It’s about how we use all of those skills to get back in the sun and keep moving forward.”
There were some changes, however. While by no means in a bad spot financially, Glowmade was no longer hooked up to the Amazon money hose. Therefore the studio needed to act like a much smaller company.
“I remember saying [to staff] that the attitude we need is to actually behave more like a startup now because we can effectively do whatever we want,” Hopper says. “And the challenge is going to be reigning in that enthusiasm and activity because we’re not financially dependent on anyone, but we’ve got to be urgent because we also don’t have infinite money and infinite time. It’s trying to balance those things. It was really exciting and it was a bit chaotic.”
Another interesting limitation for Glowmade is that the studio uses its own tech to power its games. This means that there’s only a certain kind of scope that the company can tackle. “A question I’m always asking myself is whether having our own technology stack is the right call?” Hopper says. “There’s obviously tremendous benefits to being able to take something that’s off the shelf and start plugging in. There are also issues and hurdles to deal with. Our engine is absolutely not perfect. It doesn’t do all the things that Unreal does, but it doesn’t need to. It needs to do the things we need it to do. And in some ways those limitations are useful because you then don’t have these enormous flights of fancy where you think that we could make a 100-hour RPG. Those kind of guide rails are really useful.”
“We’ve found that two projects works quite well. Three is a little harder”
Rogue Fortune isn’t the only game that Glowmade has in the works. The plan is for the studio to have a regular cadence of new releases to keep it going.
“I really want us to be able to remain independent and self-sustaining,” Hopper says. “That means roughly working on two games at once and broadly having one title out every year. We’ve got this nice pipeline of stuff. We’ve found that two projects works quite well. Three is a little harder.”
The Glowmade ethos “flexes and changes” as the company changes. In terms of what the studio wants to make, the firm’s top brass – Hopper, design director Mike Green and art director Adam Sibbick – discussed what kinds of games they want to make.
“Mike was just like: ‘I just want to make cool shit.’,” Hopper says. “Adam said he wanted to make beautiful things that win awards, which is what any art director should want to do. And then I said: ‘I just want to make interesting games’. We tried to wordsmith the theme of what Glowmade stands for. On one level, it’s about creativity; the party line is that we stand for empowering creativity. We want our games to be creative. That also stands for what I want for our team as well. I want them to feel like they are creative and they have agency.” He continues: “Ultimately it came down to what Adam, Mike and I want to see. We want to make cool, beautiful and interesting things. We’ve got our own barometer with those things.”
Asked if Glowmade is open to working on someone else’s IP or even doing co-development work, Hopper says that “he’s not averse to it at all” and in fact is “really interested in talking about” these projects.
“What those kinds of things come down to is it, again, does it tick our cool, beautiful and interesting boxes?” Hopper says. “We don’t have to do it yet. We’ve got that luxury of choice. If there was an IP that, as a team or as a studio, we could go: ‘Yes, absolutely. That is something we think we should be making,’ and that’s exciting. It’s totally up for grabs.”