Silver Lining Interactive wants you to know that everything is going swimmingly. “We couldn’t have hoped for a better first year,” is how founder Luke Keighran framed it in a celebratory press statement released this week to coincide with the launch of Outbound, a game which has racked up 1.5 million wishlists on Steam, with over 100,000 more on consoles.
“Every title published in our 2025 slate achieved a user rating of 85% or higher on Steam and is testament to our commitment to supporting original voices in the indie sphere,” Keighran said.
In these trying times where the next story about layoffs never seems too far away, it’s important to take time to celebrate the wins when they come. Silver Lining emerged from the ashes of Merge Games, which was wound down by owner Maximum Entertainment in late 2024, prompting founders Luke and Joanne Keighran to buy up many of the defunct publisher’s assets and form Silver Lining Interactive. The firm now numbers 18 employees and has a raft of new game signings under its belt (like The Witch’s Bakery), as well as the Silver Bullet initiative, aimed at championing “out there” games from new creators.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Luke Keighran emphasises that times are a-changing in the industry, and publishers need to change, too.
“I think the old school publishing model is dead,” he says. Whereas once upon a time a publisher would swoop down and take full control of everything to do with a project, possibly even snaffling up the IP rights in the process, that kind of behaviour doesn’t really fly any more.
“You need to collaborate with your developers,” insists Keighran. “They own the content, they are the future.”
There’s no one size fits all. The new model is more like pick and mix publishing, where developers choose which services they require, whether it’s marketing, help with console conversions, access to funding, or all of the above. Keighran says it’s about listening to developers and filling in the gaps in terms of the services they need.
In a world where self-publishing is an increasingly viable and even desirable option, publishers need to adapt. And Keighran says he’s happy if developers would prefer to self-publish, only relying on Silver Lining for certain services.
“We don’t mind. There’s an evolution in the market, it’s a huge evolution. We don’t even like to see ourselves as publishers anymore. We like to see ourselves as collaborators.”
Pick and mix
Keighran gives Outbound as an example of the process, where Silver Lining stepped in with support on marketing, retail and console development, while Square Glade Games handled the PC side of things.
“You’ve got these dynamic super indie developers coming to market, but they do need assistance to actually help promote their game,” says Keighran. “There’s a lot of expectations on them to actually deliver community management updates and QA, and all that type of thing. So that’s where we plug in quite well for those specific teams.”
He says that quite often, Silver Lining will just be asked for help with console ports. It hasn’t yet taken the hands-off approach of Outersloth and Evil Landfall, which simply provide developers with funding and leave them to handle marketing, porting, and so on themselves. “But that’s the next step for us,” says Keighran. “I do think we’ll have some … quieter investments in terms of what we have to do from a service perspective.”
He emphasises that despite all the industry gloom, there are reasons to be optimistic. “There’s lots of opportunities in the marketplace, despite the turbulence,” he says.
But the market is a different beast these days. The boundaries have blurred as the industry has matured. “You’ve got independent developers being super successful and becoming publishers,” says Keighran. “You’ve got marketing agencies becoming publishers, you’ve got publishers becoming developers.”
The latter is something Silver Lining is planning on doing itself, further down the line. “In terms of actual development, we’ve got a bit to learn,” admits Keighran. “But that’s the process I think everyone internally is super excited about – about trying to find gaps in the marketplace where we think that we can have a nice little niche.”
In summary, Keighran thinks that absolutely anything goes right now. “It’s the most open market I’ve ever seen, where anyone can do whatever they want.”
Let’s get physical
One aspect of publishing that Silver Lining has carried over from Merge Games is the release of physical versions of games, often long after the title has been released digitally.
“We’ve got long-term partners like Dotemu and 11-Bit Studios,” says Keighran. “We don’t touch their digital stuff, but we take their retail products to market.” The company is working on physical editions of games like Absolum, The Alters, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound and Dave The Diver.
Keighran says it’s a profitable part of the business. “You only have to ask our partners,” he says. “We do have not only a very, very strong retail market, but wholesale market as well. Day-one purchases are becoming more difficult for retail, but the catalogue business is still extremely strong.”
The model is less about getting discs into shops at launch, and instead about following up a strong title with a physical version further down the line. “If a game does well on digital, it normally will do well at retail,” explains Keighran. “It’s your top-end indies that are doing well, and then it falls away quite badly.”
In a time when entertainment is increasingly going online, demand remains for physical objects that people can put on their shelves. “There’s a huge amount of collectors out there that just like to have things that they can buy and swap,” says Keighran. “People can try games on cartridges and then resell them.”
People often buy two copies of the collector’s editions, he says. “They’ll buy one to play and they’ll buy one for their shelf.”
Go for the niche
There’s also the Silver Bullet initiative, whereby the publisher is offering funding of up to $100,000 plus various services to “back untamed, original voices in gaming.”
It launched in August 2025, and Keighran acknowledges that while there are inherent financial risks involved in targeting untested, oddball games, it’s also essential to explore new areas. “I think if you do enough market research and you stay away from genres which are a bit too saturated, then you’ve got a chance. I mean, we don’t need millions of units to actually make money. Sometimes it’s tens of thousands of units in order to find a nice niche that’s actually a very sustainable business model.”
He points to European Truck Simulator a title which started off as a tiny, unapologetically niche product and ended up growing into “something which is quite major”.
“When you have different spins on popular genres, all of a sudden they [can] become big hits, and household names,” he says. “We’re going to make some mistakes. There’s no doubt about that. But that trial and error is [a] really exciting [part of] the business. We’ve got three or four concepts already for Silver Bullet, and you’ll see some announcements around that in the next two months.”
He’s committed to casting a wide net for new titles. “I think publishing needs to be as diverse as possible, if I’m honest, so you definitely need to try out things,” he says. “Sometimes you think that some games are going to be super successful and they’re not, and then other games come out of the woodwork and they’re just incredibly, incredibly powerful.”
Like many small publishers, Silver Lining tends to focus on games where the funding requirements are less than $1 million. Keighran says they could go higher, but it’s really about the potential they see in the game.
“We’ve put a lot of money into Outbound because we felt very, very strongly that it’s going to perform,” he says. “Silver Bullet is just up to 100K, but … if you find something that resonates really well, we’ll just do whatever’s needed to actually bring that to market.”
That said, he points out that a game that cost $100,000 and a game that cost $1 million will both “compete in the same environment and can produce the same results.” In other words, investing more more might not necessarily produce better results.
As ever, games remains a hit-driven business, and something of a lottery. But Keighran thinks the odds can be stacked by working as closely as possible with developers, testing products through playtests and demos, and cutting through with a clear marketing message, only pressing go when the time is right.
“You still need to have that mature approach to say, are we sure it’s ready? Do we feel it’s ready? Do we feel we’ve got the right user feedback from our customers in order to actually deliver something? Because otherwise you have disappointment down the line.”
