The current state of the industry and the push to create new indie and AA studios –

Ordinary gamers (and developers!) love to complain about what we don’t like about a title. The graphics are outdated, the mechanics are repetitive, the amount of DLC they release at an exorbitant price, among many other complaints. If you know so much about games and perhaps how to make them, what better option than to start your own studio? Although it sounds a bit like “be your own boss,” that was the main advice from Lars Håhu s, CEO of Llama Lane, on the current state of the industry, in a message to assembled developers.

It was at the Gdańsk DevGAMM, held at the AmberExpo with the support of InvestGDA, where we were able to talk to him for a few minutes, in which he shared his views on the current state of video games, all after founding several studios.

“There’s never a better time to start the studio than today – you’ll always regret not doing it, I think, if that’s what you want to do. Obviously, when it comes to funding, it’s a little bit different than before. It’s changed a little bit, but there’s still money, and the advice I always give to founders is really to bootstrap as much as possible, which basically means if you can make your game with your own funding, your own savings, and then take it as far as you can (…) You have to have a playable game for anyone to even consider whether or not to invest in you.”

He also wanted to emphasize the importance of having a common mindset, without getting in the way of the creative vision of the studio members. To establish a solid relationship between the different members, there is no way faster than the other, it just needs to be built, get to know each other better, work side by side and share a long-term vision. “You start meeting people in school and you start building these relationships, that’s a good time to build trust. You work with them and see what they’re good at and what they’re bad at.”

But for a studio, it’s not just the dedication to the project and the passion for the environment in which you work that is important. It is essential to achieve profitability to build your products with a growing team and make a long-term living with your projects. Everyone in the company, not just management, must be clear that the product must be sustainable to ensure the survival of the project. “When people decide to become developers of game games, I think very few will have this business mentality and say, hey, let’s make money or let’s go to market and how that works and so on. There has to be a scale between them.

The full interview touches on many more topics, for example, the Swedish model in video games, where there is no government funding for video games, which means studios have to adopt a business mentality from the beginning. This has made the industry more self-sufficient. “People in Sweden have been successful in making games that have made money and they’ve even made some money out of that and become relatively wealthy, that they’re investing back into the industry because they want to.”

If you want to learn more about this interesting world, we leave you with the full DevGAMM interview with local subtitles below.

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