It’s been nine years since Mike Rose set up the indie publisher No More Robots.
The firm has seen solid success in that time, in part bolstered by a back catalogue that includes the bike-riding megatitle Descenders, which was the first game released under the No More Robots name and which is still a huge seller.
Now, No More Robots is set to release its first self-developed game, the cruise liner simulator Cruise Control, after a major pivot along the way. The title’s genesis was a discussion between Rose and Dan Foster, who joined No More Robots to deliver console ports, but brought online multiplayer experience from his time at Team 17. The conversation spawned development of a team-based online shooter, which ultimately took three years and attracted interest from a “big company”, says Rose. “Someone who you would know very well.”
The future seemed bright – but ultimately the other party pulled out, saying it wasn’t the right fit. This was also around the time that Concord came out and was swiftly pulled from sale, potentially signalling problems in the online shooter space.
“As you’d imagine, there’s no way that we as a tiny company could just launch an online multiplayer shooter by ourselves,” Rose says. “Maybe I could just find someone else. But also I was just crushed. It was one of the most unpleasant things I’ve felt in this industry. And it was from a partner who I massively respect.”
Why liner
No More Robots put the shooter project on ice, and Rose had to work out what the five-person development team would work on next. He hit on the idea of Cruise Control. Or, to be specific, the name Cruise Control, followed by a game idea that he knew was “a thing we could make quickly… and it’s a genre on PC that we know does well.”
It started as a cruise ship management game in the vein of games like Two Point Hospital or Two Point Museum, but has since evolved into more of a puzzle title inspired by the likes of Mini Motorways.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rose says that releasing a game his own company has made is a very different experience from publishing someone else’s work. Despite the higher level of anxiety, the No More Robots boss says the potential upside of Cruise Control doing well is much higher.
“The way that I’m treating Cruise Control is this game is going to do roughly three times as well for us as a normal game, because we’re making 100% of it,” he says. “Normally we’re taking a small cut of a game we’re working with. Every sale of Cruise Control is worth three or four times as much to us. If we manage to make it do as well as one of our other games, that would be massive for us.”
If Cruise Control does well, Rose says that No More Robots might reheat the shooter that it was working on before. The company has a demo ready to go, but the version that makes it into the wild might be different and more scaled-back.
“I think that PvP shooters are not a viable thing for us,” Rose says. “As a small company, to enter that space would be insane. I’ve started to think about repurposing it into a PvE thing.”
Bloodbath
Looking back at the last few years in the games industry, Rose describes the scene as a “massacre”. But No More Robots didn’t grow significantly during the COVID video game boom – the reason being that expansion “scared the shit” out of Rose – and thus hasn’t had to make the deep cuts that other companies have had to make since.
Rose fully admits that this was an “accidental” bit of “genius”.
“At the end of 2021, I just split all the profits between all the staff,” he says. “I gave our staff lots of money and rolled into 2022 thinking that that would just happen again. When it didn’t, we were fine as we hadn’t expanded. We just broke even again. We don’t need to make loads of money, because who needs it? Everyone’s getting paid. We’re putting out a bunch of games; we’re having fun. I know this sounds so naive and stupid, but somehow it’s working.”
For the most part, No More Robots’ publishing model hasn’t changed much either. The label’s megahit Descenders had a five-figure budget. The same is true for the majority of the company’s games, including Hypnospace Outlaw and Yes, Your Grace. But a few games received larger budgets around COVID (“I did get caught up a little bit in what was happening,” Rose admits), and No More Robots was “bit a couple of times for that”.
Now, the company is firmly back to five-figure budgets, with the only exception being Another Door, an upcoming multiplayer roguelike with a budget of $180,000.
“I remember speaking to my wife, just saying that I was so sure about this one,” Rose says. “She just said go for it. We just announced it, and it is popping. Obviously we still need to launch it. I’m hoping my intuition was correct on that one. But outside of that, our budgets have been low. They’ve been like five figures for the majority of games recently.”
One reason Rose has been keen to stick with lower budgets is the unpredictable nature of the indie games business, where it’s almost impossible to predict which games will blow up.
“I have to assume that every game will just do fine,” he explains. “I have to assume that we’re not going to be the flavour of the month; but if we are, that’s fantastic. We just had Thank You for Your Application and were the flavour of the week. That was amazing. I didn’t know that was going to happen. I signed that game because I love this kind of document-checking genre.
“Thank You for Your Application was a Chinese student team, which I thought sounded fun. I didn’t sign it knowing that it would pop off, but I thought it had the ingredients that meant it would. If it hadn’t, I needed to make sure the maths worked and that they were still going to be fine. If you build launches around ‘If this launch is fine, we’ll be good, and if it’s amazing, we’ll be very good’, that’s how you survive this thing.”
Descenders’ ascent
By far the biggest success No More Robots has seen to date is the first game it released – 2017’s Descenders. That title has now surpassed $35 million in revenue. As Rose says, “on a small budget, it’s not bad at all”.
But what is perhaps more surprising is that half of Descenders’ sales have been made in the last year; between April and September 2025, the game just “popped”, Rose says, although there was no obvious reason why.
Still, Rose thinks that part of the reason for Descenders’ success is that it is “accidentally a Roblox game”.
“We didn’t mean to do it, but what I mean by that is that any kid right now can boot Descenders up, and the game literally just goes: ‘Hey, ride a bike’, and that’s all it does,” he says. “You literally hold the trigger, and the bike goes forward, and then you go left, and you go right, and it goes left and right. We have kids who literally sit in the lobby for hours and days, not doing anything other than just riding on the little ramps that are in the lobby.
“99% of the reviews on Steam are kids saying ‘bike goes brrrr'”
“[Developer] Rage Squid did not make that game for those people. When we were trying to sell the game, we wanted mountain bikers and hardcore people to play, people in their 30s. People in their 30s don’t mind the game. They’re kind of into it. But 99% of the reviews on Steam are kids saying ‘bike goes brrrr’.”
In fact, Descenders was such a ‘Roblox game’ that No More Robots was in discussions with the company about making and funding a version of the game for its own platform. Rose says this process went on for about six months and involved a ten-step approval process. At the final stage, Rose says that CEO Dave Baszucki shot the project down.
“All the way through the whole process, people at Roblox had been telling us that this was perfect because there’s nothing like it so far,” he says. “This was perfect. And then the CEO of Roblox told us that this is too different from anything that’s already on here and would confuse their users.”
When Roblox declined to pursue the port, Rose says that No More Robots could have funded the project itself, but it was “too much of a gamble”.
“We’d just be putting the game out. We had no experience whatsoever of doing Roblox,” Rose says. “It could have been a disaster. I do actually semi-regret not doing it because Roblox is so huge.”
The firm has stayed committed on PC releases, refocusing on the platform after a period of console-facing titles chiefly delivered through Game Pass, the deals for which Rose describes “huge” for the smaller-scale of games that No More Robots publishes.
Reading the runes
Historically, wishlists and pre-orders have been viewed as key indicators of a game’s future success, although Fireshine recently pointed to a range of different ways for gauging player interest.
For Rose, “the best sign is when a game is organically getting interest, and we’re not having to force it.” One way to spot this, he says, is to look at the graph for Steam wishlists; a graph that is going steadily up is preferable to one that is flat, with spikes occurring around marketing beats.
“Those will happen when they’re doing an influencer push or something,” Rose says. “That’s great, but when they’re not doing anything, no one cares. I don’t mean that in a mean way; I mean that they’re just not getting organic interest. It’s not a good sign when, on a normal day, ten wishlists trickle in, and there’s just generally not much interest.”
Wishlists are one reason why Rose is so confident about Another Door. The No More Robots boss even believes it could be another Descenders-sized success.
“Organically, this game, without us doing anything, is just getting thousands and thousands of wishlists every day,” Rose says.
“And then when I do something, like a little influencer push for it, we get four times as many wishlists as we normally do. That’s a good sign. I know that seems like a very preemptive thing to say, but even now we’re at least six months away from launch, and I just kind of know already. It’s very rare to have that. I’ve never had that in the history of No More Robots. The sky is the limit on this if we do this correctly. When we get to launch, this could be insane.”
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But as No More Robots approaches what could well be its biggest hit to date, Rose says that nine years in, while he enjoys the work, he is “a drained person”.
“I don’t want to do it for much longer,” he admits. “I want to do something new soon. I think I want a new challenge, and I’ve got some ideas of things I want to do.”
“I don’t want to do it for much longer”
Part of this is the fact that No More Robots hasn’t scaled massively; Rose still handles a lot of the label’s operations himself. Even with the release of Thank You for Your Application, he says he had “many sleepless nights” and a huge level of stress.
“It had nothing to do with the game; I knew it was going to do well,” he says. “It was just like, I’ve done so many launches now.”
“I’m moving towards 100% done,” he concludes. “I don’t know when that’s going to be.”