“It’s less risky to be the masters of our own fate” – The AAA developers going indie

Justin Fischer and Brock Feldman suddenly found themselves out of a job in 2025, when Warner Bros decided to shutter their studio, Player First Games, the developer of Multiversus.

The free-to-play fighting game, which featured various Warner Bros characters, had launched in beta in 2022 before going offline around a year later, in preparation for the full launch in May 2024. Warner acquired Player First just after that 1.0 launch – then announced the studio’s closure seven months later, after pulling the plug on Multiversus.

Fischer says that there’s no secret around why the game shut down. “It’s just user acquisition costs are hard for everybody,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “Free-to-play has been taking a beating, and it wasn’t just Multiversus… The economy of the industry is changing, and it’s hard out there for everybody.”

The story is a depressingly familiar one. It’s estimated that there have been more than 58,000 layoffs in the games industry since 2022, with the majority occurring in North America. The AAA sector has been particularly hard hit. “I think this is as bad as the ’83 crash if you’re a game developer based in North America or western Europe, in a traditional AAA studio,” said 1UP Ventures’ Amir Satvat in a recent feature in Edge magazine. “That is ground zero for destruction.”

Many of those leaving the AAA sector – Fischer and Feldman included – have sought refuge in the indie space, and GamesIndustry.biz has spoken to developers who have made the leap from AAA to indie in recent years to find out their experiences. The pay cut can be considerable, and the risk of failure in such a crowded market is high. Yet with so few jobs remaining in AAA, for many there is little choice but to go indie – although the relative freedom can be empowering.

Reach for the stars

Fischer and Feldman formed Airlock Games last year, and they are currently working on the sci-fi horror management sim What the Stars Forgot. Fischer says that in such a competitive environment, with user acquisition costs “through the roof” it made more sense to them to start with something small, rather than attempting to raise “$30 million to do a massive multiplayer competitive game.”

The idea was to focus on a concept they could make quickly and that they were passionate about, instead of trying to cater to the largest possible audience. “We can fail fast,” says Fischer, referring to the oft-quoted tech industry maxim, adding that they wanted to do something that felt realistic with the current state of the industry.

Importantly, they’re having fun. “For me personally, it’s been the best time I’ve had games in a long time making them, and the most fun I’ve had, and the most energised I feel,” says Fischer. He says that as you become more senior in the games industry, you tend to be put in a “box” and end up working only on one specific area of expertise. But after years of being boxed in as a producer, Fischer now gets to dabble in things like audio and dialogue. “I get to work a lot of sides of my brain every day, and that just is really satisfying, really engaging, really fun.”

Airlock Games has deliberately created a small scope for its debut title. “Brock and I are very good at figuring out scope,” says Fischer, “and we’ve had conversations multiple times where usually it’s me saying, ‘Hey, you want to have this idea?’ And he’s like, ‘That’s awesome: that’s game six’.” The idea is to start something they can finish in a reasonable amount of time, rather than getting lost down a “rabbit hole of content”.

“We can’t control what the publisher scene looks like, but we can control what we’re making”

Fischer and Feldman are also aware that now is a terrible time to be looking for investors, with most of them having moved on to things like AI after pouring money into the games industry during the COVID era. That’s why they’re intending to ship What the Stars Forgot “without a dollar of investment”.

“Brock and I both have authority issues, so we’d like to not sell parts of the company and just be able to totally bootstrap this ourselves,” says Fischer. “It’s the one thing totally in our control. I can’t control what the investment environment looks like, we can’t control what the publisher scene looks like, but we can control what we’re making, and how we ship it, and how we communicate with an audience.”

That said, Airlock Games is happy to have conversations with “interesting partners who want to help us on this journey”, and the firm raised over $25,000 in a Kickstarter campaign for What the Stars Forgot last year. Otherwise, though, the pair are getting by on their severance pay from Warner Bros.

“It’s definitely scrappy,” says Fischer. “It’s bootstrap for sure. But at the moment, it’s been nice to just focus on making something and not having to worry about the investment side, not having to worry about a big corporate hierarchy that you have to answer to.”

The pair are more than aware of the risks involved in going it alone and the difficulty of standing out in such a crowded marketplace. But they’re not doing it to get rich. “Success level one is Brock and I get to keep doing this,” explains Fischer. “Success level two is we get to keep doing this and we get to grow. Success level three is we’re millionaires. And Brock and I are much more interested in the first two at the moment.”

Better than doomscrolling

Murray Pannell has worked in marketing and publishing for decades at a number of huge games companies, including Electronic Arts, Xbox, PlayStation, and Ubisoft. “I’ve done the rounds, that’s for sure,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz.

When we last caught up with him in 2021 he had just left 2K Games, and since then he has held chief marketing roles at Build A Rocket Boy, PlayFusion, and Everreach Labs. The latter studio was where he met game designer Phil O’Connor, who has had a similarly stellar career, working at companies like Ubisoft, Codemasters, and 2K Australia.

“When the studio was ultimately put on ice, we said, ‘Well, we’ve got some great people here, we’ve got some great working relationships, why don’t we see whether we can just do our own thing?'” recalls Pannell. “Rather than sitting there doomscrolling LinkedIn all day long, we thought, ‘We’ve got some great opportunities’.”

Along with several other co-founders, Pannell and O’Connor started up Big Dumb Games at the beginning of 2026, and their first title is the co-op space survival game Starship Bloopers. To say it’s been a massive change for them is an understatement. “We went from a big career in AAA publishing with big support around you to, ‘you’re building it yourself and you’ve got to use all the tricks of your trade to make it work’,” says Pannell.

“I’ve never encountered such difficulty in finding work”

Then again, as O’Connor points out, working in video games has never been a very stable career. He notes that both him and Pannell have had similar experiences with “a lot of sudden restructuring or project cancellations”. Both O’Connor and his wife, who is also a game developer, have had to move a lot for the sake of finding work down the years, and it finally reached a point where enough was enough. “Frankly, my wife said, ‘That’s it. We’re not moving any more’.”

More to the point, there aren’t any jobs to move to. “I’ve never encountered such difficulty in finding work and generating new projects,” says O’Connor. “While that was never easy, it became kind of a brick wall recently.” Even with so many years of experience behind him, he has found he often doesn’t even get replies to job applications. “I’ve been told by recruiters, tone down those 30 years of experience, I wouldn’t mention that, it makes you sound old.”

Given that, starting up something themselves seemed like the logical, and perhaps only, next step. “It’s less risky to be the masters of our own fate rather than depending on the game industry, which is not a dependable partner.”

But going it alone means taking a cut in salary. “We’re trying to build this on a shoestring,” says Pannell, noting that the studio is unfunded and is relying on the co-founders’ savings, but is hoping to get some grants and small seed investment. (Pannell has also just started as head of publishing at Undisputed developer Steel City Interactive, so that is likely to help keep the wolves from the door for a while longer.)

“Once you’re responsible for all the spending,” adds O’Connor, “you realise how much the runway depends on how much you pay everybody. And we certainly are going to take a pay cut.”

Pannell explains that currently, anyone who joins Big Dumb Games is being given a percentage share of future profits rather than a salary. “There are so many people out in the industry, great people with great ideas and skills, who are currently not putting that to good use because they haven’t got a job,” says Pannell. “They’ve been laid off, studios have closed, projects have been shuttered. So we thought if we can tap into our network and bring some like-minded people on, then yes, we might not be able to pay you today, but in a world where we make some money, we will hopefully all be buying Ferraris and living in Barbados.”

Some skill sets have been harder to find than others. “Programmers have no trouble finding work in this economy,” says O’Connor. “They’re probably the hardest people to find that are willing to contribute in exchange for credits. But there’s a lot of artists that are out of work, unfortunately. They’re probably the most numerous category.”

“It’s been probably one of the most rewarding years of my life”

Even though money is extremely tight, Pannell says he has been thoroughly enjoying his work with Big Dumb Games. “It’s been probably one of the most rewarding years of my life, albeit probably the least financially rewarding,” he says.

O’Connor is also enjoying the change from AAA. “The freedom is a huge plus,” he says. “The AAA industry gives you the comfort of the salary and big projects, but agency is probably one of the last things you get.”

Being the master of his own destiny is a welcome change. “I’ve never been given the opportunity to decide what a project is: I’ve always walked into a project that’s been designed already,” he says. This time around, Starship Bloopers is his own baby, and he thinks indies like this are where the zeitgeist is at. “I believe that the demand for fresh experiences is much higher now. There’s a lot of retreading and very similar products coming out from the big publishers, and people are craving boutique games, and they’re walking to them in droves. So I think it’s a perfect opportunity for a creative to jump in there.”

Yet it remains a big risk, especially given the ever-increasing competition: last month, more than 700 games were released on Steam in a single week. But even if Starship Bloopers fails to make an impact, O’Connor says he will still keep trying to make his own games. “I want to keep doing it until I’m no longer able to, I can’t contemplate doing anything else. So this is what I have to do in order to make that happen, because no one’s going to hire me to do it.

“And frankly, I don’t want to work for anyone else any more.”