“Across the industry, we don’t think enough about how we match the scope to what we’re making” – Mike Bithell on why the world needs an im-slim

2025 was a very bad year for Mike Bithell. In August, he announced that the majority of full-time staff were being let go from Bithell Games, with 11 jobs being made redundant.

Bithell rose to prominence as one of the wave of outspoken indie creators in the early 2010s, releasing his breakout hit Thomas Was Alone in 2012. He followed that up with the stealth game Volume in 2015, along with the “Bithell Shorts” Subsurface Circular and Quarantine Circular. But then Bithell Games started to take on bigger, licensed properties, beginning with John Wick Hex in 2019 and followed by a collaboration with Disney on Tron: Identity and Tron: Catalyst, released in 2023 and 2025, respectively. The company’s headcount grew.

Ultimately, it didn’t work out. John Wick Hex did well, selling nearly 450,000 units across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, according to estimates from Video Game Insights. But the Tron games bombed. VGI reckons that Tron: Catalyst sold only around 16,000 units across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox (the game was also released on Switch, for which figures aren’t available). VGI data for Tron: Identity are even lower – just under 9,000 units for Steam (again, Switch sales are unavailable).

Given those numbers, it’s little surprise that the company had to downsize. Bithell Games is now just three people: “myself, Alexander [Sliwinski] my business partner, and a marketing person,” Bithell tells GamesIndustry.biz. He’s frank about the awfulness of the situation he faced last summer.

“It sucked,” he says. “It was a very talented team. They were fucking awesome. They were the best people I’ve ever worked with.”

Coming back from that dreadful summer has been hard. “It was a little while before I got started again,” says Bithell. “But I distract myself by coding, and that weirdly ended up being something interesting.” That weird something is Vampirium 1997, an immersive sim in which Dracula is the King of England (the similarity to Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels is entirely coincidental, Bithell says – he wasn’t aware of Newman’s books).

“I needed a project just from a ‘keeping myself sane’ point of view,” explains Bithell. “I decided to learn Godot, because I’ve been using Unity for all these years and I was ready to try something else. So just as a hobby thing, I started to play with Godot, and then made prototypes of different things, because that’s how I learn engines. And one of them, a couple of months later, turned into the beginnings of this. But it was a tough time. It was a really tough time.”

Im-slim

Vampirium 1997, as a small, experimental game based on new IP, is the antithesis of working on Disney-licensed titles. “It is nice to have complete control and to… not have to worry about the absolutely reasonable concerns of major corporations,” says Bithell, who’s relishing the freedom to “just make something that feels very me, and to be able to talk about it completely freely and give honest, complete answers to what we’re doing with it. I’m really enjoying that aspect of it.”

“Right now I’m loving what I’m doing,” he adds. “I want to go wherever this game takes me. I genuinely think there’s awesome potential.”

In Vampirium 1997, the player is an assassin in the employ of Dracula. But unlike the giants of the immersive sim genre like Thief, Deus Ex, or Dishonored, the game uses a minimalist, top-down approach with static character portraits and verb-based choices. Bithell is calling it an “im-slim”.

“It’s taking the possibility space, the verbiage, the ability to figure out your own path through a space of immersive sims, but then abstracting it into this tile-based game,” he says.

“I can make a mechanic very quickly, I can add a new verb to the game in a couple of days”

It’s a bold format to experiment with. Games in the genre are often critically well received, but are rarely huge sellers, and often take an enormous amount of time to produce owing to the complexity of the emergent gameplay. It seems like an awful lot to take on as a single developer. Is it really possible to do an im-slim?

“I hope so,” responds Bithell. “It’d be a terrible shame if it wasn’t. I think for me, it’s much like real dieting. It’s about slimming the right aspects of it.”

His strategy is to make the visuals of the game as simple as possible while putting the majority of development time into the game’s intricate web of interactions. “That, to me, is the thing that I care about as a player of those games.” Trimming the game down to tiles and words “frees me up to massively overinvest in the possibility space,” he says. “So I can make a mechanic very quickly, I can add a new verb to the game in a couple of days. And when you compare that to if you wanted to add a new mechanic to a traditional 3D game, obviously that’s an enormous investment of time.”

Of course, with something like that, the temptation is to always keep adding. “As a designer, the form encourages experimentation, it encourages you to keep expanding,” acknowledges Bithell. “In a traditional 3D environment, that’s feature creep. That’s a nightmare for your entire team. With this game though, something that starts as a very small idea can scale up and become something. And that’s the strength of this game.”

He gives the example of adding a “push” verb in response to a playtester asking why they didn’t have the option to push another character off a balcony. That, in turn, sparked new ideas. Can you push characters into objects to damage them? Can you shove them into different rooms? “That verb that started as the balcony push becomes the shove verb, and then has all of these interesting tweaks on gameplay elsewhere in the game.”

“As a creative, that’s the good stuff when you can actually just run through an idea and see where it takes you,” says Bithell. But crucially, the time impact is small – measured in days rather than months of extra development time.

Risk versus reward

Vampirium 1997 was announced in early July after only nine months in development, and with no inkling of a release date. One might think that the early reveal was a way to get investors on board – but that’s not the case, says Bithell. “No, we don’t want investment. I don’t want any money coming in from anyone else.”

Now Bithell Games has been stripped down to a skeleton staff, he thinks the money coming in from back catalogue sales will be enough to sustain the firm for the near future. “We are obviously a very cheap company to run at this point.”

More to the point, Bithell questions whether investors would be interested in something so unproven. “It is a very experimental game. I think you would actually have a hard time convincing a publisher this early that this concept works. We have faith in it, but it is a weird game.”

More generally he laments what he sees as risk aversion among game publishers, with most now only willing to fund projects once they are already well advanced. “You have to convince the publishers that you are a sure thing. And the problem is that requires people either to go into massive debt or to have a previously successful thing. And a lot of developers who are in the position we are – where we do have a back catalogue and an ability to sustain for a little while – are looking at that situation and going, ‘Sorry, so why do I need to go to a publisher for the last 20% in exchange for an enormous cut of what we would ever make, if they’re not interested in helping us to get to the finish line? Why would we let them join in the fun of actually launching the game and making money?’ That seems counterproductive.”

“Why do I need to go to a publisher for the last 20% in exchange for an enormous cut?”

He says he understands why publishers have become more cautious in recent years, and doesn’t want to “knock all publishers with the same brush,” but recognises that it has become more difficult for developers to get new games off the ground.

“I remember when we were pitching games to publishers a decade ago, you could basically have a really nice document with great artwork, and a nice idea, and a track record of shipping games, and you could walk in and you could get good funding for a good game. But now, in many cases, you actually need to announce the game in order to prove the audience is there to get people to come to you.”

Sensible scope

On paper, Vampirium 1997 is a risky game thanks to its experimental nature and the patchy financial success of previous immersive sims. But Bithell is confident. He says it’s all about determining the appropriate scope for the size of the potential audience – the product/market fit.

“The thing that I think other industries are frankly better than us at doing is going: what is the market for this product? And then making the amazing, revolutionary step of going, well, what’s the scale of project we should make for that, then? And I think where a lot of games go wrong with immersive sims is they go, ‘This will be the one that crosses over to mainstream AAA, so we will go for a big visual flourish, we’ll spend a lot of money on it’.”

Bithell is taking the opposite approach, making something with a very small budget and then seeing whether the audience is there for it before building up. “I think across the industry, we don’t think enough about how we match the scope to what we’re making,” he says. “It’s the stuff that other industries figured out 70 years ago. I think optimism unfortunately often plays too big a role, and I’m very guilty of that. I’ve definitely made that mistake in the past of going, ‘No, this one will be the version of this genre that absolutely blows up’.”

“Optimism unfortunately often plays too big a role”

For Vampirium 1997, by contrast, the aim is to slowly build interest through social media – although Bithell says a key component is the game’s mailing list, through which he has been releasing chapters of a story called The Lost Portrait which is building up the game’s lore. “Everything old is new again,” he says regarding the sudden reemergence of newsletters. “The places we’re having success right now with our marketing and spreading the word are the things that basically I was doing in 2012.”

And although he says there’s been a “vacuum of support” in the industry since publishers began pulling back from funding early-stage projects, he has been heartened to see studios step in to fill the gap. “There’s definitely a long history of indies helping each other out with stuff,” he says. “People are pulling together for warmth.”