Mimimi closing after releasing final game, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew
https://www.mimimi.games/our-final-game/
What are people's thoughts on this? They appear to have had a successful existence, been well received critically and kept things going for 15 years, but have now essentially said fuck this shit, citing the toll it all takes on their personal lives. Notably it doesn't appear to have been a direct result of financial distress, unless I'm reading it wrong.
This seems like a pretty damning take on the games industry, particularly for smaller players. They mention the difficulty in their chosen "stealth strategy" genre, but it would seem applicable to most of the niche or somewhat-niche genres.
Posted Aug 30, 2023, 1:46 PM UTC
13
You can make any niche of games work so long as you balance dev cost and market size. If there are fewer people playing stealth strategy then each game has to take less time and money to make a profit. They went with a longer strategy, spending a lot of time on each particular game and then cutting off their own long tail selling Shadow Tactics to basically every bundle and subscription service.
If the company was doing fantastically well they'd take a step back and hire more people to keep the games flowing, so one has to imagine they've done well enough to stay in business for that many years but not so well they were able to truly grow. It really isn't enough to make good games to stay in business, you need a good business plan as well. I wish them luck on all their future endeavors, but I don't think it's damning for the industry overall, whether indie or otherwise.