Why gaming’s most influential indie label has stayed small for a decade

When the duo behind Hotline Miami signed on with game publisher Devolver Digital, they thought the company was a lot bigger than it actually was. “For a long time, I think almost two years or something, we thought that Devolver had an office with a receptionist and a big Devolver sign on a 10 story building,” says Dennis Wedin, one half of the Swedish group behind the stylish and super violent game. Not only was Devolver a team of just six people, but they didn’t even have an office. Their corporate address was actually a bird feed shop owned by co-founder Rick Stults.

This month, Devolver is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Over that span, the company has published close to 100 games, ranging from the gorgeously animated Gris to the arcade action of Downwell to the Zelda-like The Swords of Ditto to the Tinder-esque strategy of Reigns. It has also had to adapt to a constantly shifting industry, dealing with the advent of mobile gaming and VR, new platforms like the Switch and Epic’s PC store, and accessible development tools like Unity and GameMaker.

But during that time, one thing has remained largely the same: Devolver has stayed small, with the same goal of helping indie developers reach a larger audience. It can take unknown games and turn them into hits. The publisher has slowly grown to a still-tiny 16 people, and they remain scattered across the globe with no physical office. As the company looks toward the future, it has no real plans to change that.

“It’s the only way to maintain the purity of the mission,” says co-founder Mike Wilson.

The success of Devolver was far from a guarantee. The company’s co-founders had twice tried to build a publishing label that offered developers more friendly terms, including ownership over their properties. The idea was to handle the business, promotional, and logistical aspects of releasing a new game while letting developers focus almost entirely on making the best experience. Both publishers — Gathering of Developers, founded in 1998, and Gamecock, which launched in 2007 — were eventually acquired by larger companies and subsequently shut down. The problem was money: during the early 2000s, retail games were still dominant, and it required a lot of money to compete, making it tough to create a viable indie label. In a lot of ways, those early attempts were ahead of their time, and Devolver arrived at just the right moment.

“One of the first decisions we made at Devolver is we’re going to move away from the idea of physical goods and move to digital and just focus on Steam,” explains co-founder Graeme Struthers. “Once you make that decision to go into the digital space, it frees you up from so many other things. Steam was growing and growing, and that certainly made it feel like the idea that Devolver represented had a better chance at success.”

In addition to sticking to digital games, the then-six-person team also decided to avoid corporate backing in order to maintain control over the company. Many even worked additional jobs to keep things afloat (hence the bird feed store). “If we were going to do it again, we weren’t going to be beholden to investors that really didn’t give a shit about what we were doing,” says Wilson.

They also lucked into having a notable first release. During their time at Gamecock, Devolver’s founders had worked with Croteam, the Croatian studio behind the Serious Sam series of over-the-top first-person shooters. For the first few years, the only games Devolver worked on were HD remakes of the first two Serious Sam games. “We purposefully didn’t sign anything else because we didn’t want to get ourselves into a position where we had to raise so much money that we weren’t in control,” says Wilson. Around the same time, small indie teams were making waves in the industry, and the team at Devolver came up with a clever idea: partnering with indie studios, like Dutch duo Vlambeer, to create smaller games based on Serious Sam.

After that early success, Devolver finally started to open up and accept new games, most notably Hotline Miami. But they still had to say no — a lot. A six-person team can only do so much. “We sent them an email, and they said they were too busy,” says Evan Greenwood, creative director at Free Lives, developer of the action movie parody shoot ‘em up Broforce. But Greenwood was persistent. As a South African studio, Free Lives faced extra challenges when it came to marketing their game and dealing with the major platform holders in Asia, Europe, and North America. Greenwood had spoken to other publishers, but the tone of Devolver and its games intrigued him. “That made us think they would be a good fit brand-wise for us,” he says of seeing Hotline Miami.

Eventually, space opened up, the two sides began working together, and they haven’t looked back. Devolver published not only Broforce, but also follow-ups like the bizarre party game Genital Jousting and the VR action title Gorn. Free Lives is now a successful and established studio, but even still, Greenwood says that the team never really thought about finding a new partner. “The things that they promised, they delivered on,” he says. “So we’ve been able to go into subsequent games thinking, ‘Well, we still like what you offer.’” The same is true for Wedin. “We never thought about doing it ourselves,” he explains. “It would almost be like firing people from your own company if we did it.”

Whereas many publisher / developer relationships can seem adversarial, with the studio focused on creativity and the corporation worried about money, for Devolver, it seems more like a partnership. “We’ve ended up with a bunch of long-term relationships,” says Struthers. “We’ve found that once we start working with people, everybody gets comfortable with each other and we spend a lot of time on the road with each other, and it’s just naturally flowed from there. One of the reasons why we’re not very active in terms of bringing new games into the company is that the teams we’re working with are pretty prolific.”

For consumers, the Devolver name has become synonymous with outrageous stunts. The company puts on a surreal press conference at E3 every year, and instead of getting a booth on the show floor, they rent out a parking lot across the street to showcase new games. Devolver’s Twitter presence includes Fork Parker, a parody of a clueless old game executive, and the company once turned a viral tweet into a publishing deal. This has helped establish it as something of a punk rock label for games, and it may be a reason why a lot of developers are initially interested in working with Devolver. (Wilson says the company turns down around 25 “totally viable” games every week.) But that attitude is not why developers stick around.

Despite appearances, Devolver is buttoned down when it needs to be. The company negotiates deals with platforms like Steam and PlayStation, helps launch games in new territories, and deals with the logistics of showcasing games at events like E3 and PAX. One of the reasons Devolver had to hire new people was to deal with these kinds of situations. They now have staff focused on the Chinese market, for instance, and a much larger events team. “The fact that Devolver can pull out that seriousness when it’s needed, and at the same time be silly and ridiculous with us, that hasn’t changed,” says Greenwood. “The scale at which they’re doing it at has changed, but it doesn’t feel different.”

Today, Devolver publishes more games than ever, but it also publishes a greater breadth of titles. That still means small games built by teams of two or three, but also larger titles from the likes of From Software. This year, the label has launched the AI horror game Observation, an action game about mech cats called Gato Roboto, and the jazz-infused brawler Ape Out. It also faces greater competition than ever. Over the last few years, a new wave of indie publishers has surfaced, including the likes of Double Fine and Annapurna Interactive, which have seen some levels of success. Ten years ago, Devolver felt like one last stab at an idea. Today, indie publishing is a growing field.

A lot has changed since 2009 — both in the industry and for Devolver, in particular. Even the bird store is gone, sold off last year after 15 years of ownership. But despite all of this, Wilson says that the core mission has never really wavered. “We don’t get greedy, and we stay humble about who is important in this publisher / developer relationship,” he explains. “It’s really the talent.”