StrayĪnnapurna Interactive is one of the most prominent publishers of indie games today, with titles like Stray, Outer Wilds, Neon White, Donut County and What Remains of Edith Finch on its books. Annapurna bit, and Ruiz landed a publishing deal. The game has a complex premise - it stars Clem, a desert bounty hunter with plenty of baggage, and it involves mech battles, emotional narrative scenes and home-management mechanics, including some light gardening. Ruiz did contract work for a while after Aztez, and in 2018 he pitched Bounty Star to people he knew at Annapurna. Even with a hefty amount of hype behind it, Aztez had trouble standing out, and that was the last time Ruiz tried self-publishing. There were 309 games added to Steam in 2010 in 2017, there were 6,306. Ruiz and his business partner built Aztez in between contract projects, and by the time it was ready to debut on Steam in 2017, the indie market was saturated. It shifted to a community-voting approach called Greenlight, before eventually landing on the everything-goes Early Access model we know today. This system had fully imploded by 2012: On the heels of breakout hits like Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez, the indie market was overrun by new games and developers, and Steam dropped its curation efforts. He began working on Aztez in 2010, when Steam was a curated marketplace where Valve employees hand-selected individual games for the platform. Ruiz’s career is a microcosm of the shifting landscape for indie developers over the past 10 years. “It’s possible, but without help, I just don't know how anyone's doing it … I got a lot of friends in the same boat.” “Everything favors a publisher relationship, seemingly, because self-publishing has become this extraordinarily difficult thing,” Ruiz said. Bounty Star is being published by Annapurna Interactive and it’s due out in early 2024. Nowadays, Ruiz is running a five-person studio called Dinogod and he’s building Bounty Star, a game that blends mech combat with life-sim mechanics. He founded two studios, he did contract work on titles including Super Meat Boy and Overland, and he independently published a tentpole original project, the monochromatic brawler Aztez. “I don't think I ever want to self-publish again.”īen Ruiz has been a game developer since 2005, and in that time, he’s pretty much done it all. For the moment, this shift is powering a small but highly visible boom in the world of indie games. The distribution process for indie developers has shifted over the past few years from a self-publishing-first model, to one that prioritizes deal-making and acquisitions. For anyone with an eye on video game news, it’s been hard to ignore the recent rise of names like Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital, Private Division, Humble, Epic Games and Netflix tied to independent projects.
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