I’ve been following developer Die Gute Fabrik’s work for much longer than I’ve been a part of the games media industry, so I was very pained to hear that due to a lack of funding,it is halting productionand helping its team find new roles in the industry.
The developer of Mutazione andSaltsea Chroniclesfirst came to my attention in 2020 when it first announced its Writing and Narrative Design Internship, offering a pay rate and employment structure previously unheard of among most game studios, let alone smaller independent ones. You’d be hard pressed to find what they were offering anywhere at the time, and especially now.
This internship, as well as the Game Writing internship it offered the next year, was a five to seven month internship, required two days a week of work, was entirely remote (as long as there was some time zone overlap with Copenhagen), and paid over $400 a day. That’s for an entry-level role with no experience required, and according to the job posting, included dedicated mentorship time each month and offered a free work laptop that could be kept after the internship was over.
That is more than many people get for a full time job, and these practices carry over to regular employment as well: the company moved to a four day work week in 2020 as part of a larger revision of working processes to make them “more humane, more accessible, and more welcoming to marginalised folks”. Studio Lead and CEO Hannah Nicklin evenpublished a transparent explainer of how the company did thisas a roadmap for others to follow.
The company also introduced a ‘flat rate’ so that everybody in the company is paid the same, with slightly higher rates for those who work with the company for more than a year, and revenue share for anyone working on a game for more than six months.
You’ll find similarly radical themes in Die Gute Fabrik’s games, especially its last two. Mutazione is a game about music and gardening, but it’s also about community, colonialism, and grief. Saltsea Chronicles, released just last year, follows a group of sailors investigating the disappearance of their captain, and puts forward themes of reparative justice, collaboration, and chosen family. (This piecein Paste Magazine describes it beautifully.) I would go so far as to say both are lightly anarchic.
I cannot say for sure, as I have never worked at Die Gute Fabrik, but what I’ve seen of the company’s practices indicate that it was a studio that held progressive values. Those values shone through in its work, and that it also implemented those values in how the company was run. That makes its closing especially painful – it was an example of a better, more equitable way to make games in an industry that is now so marked by poor working conditions, mass layoffs, and the pursuit of impossible profit generation.
In the company’s own words, the best way to support it is to buy its games. I don’t know how much of a difference it will make at this point, but company leadership is still seeking funding and good sales might make future projects more viable as well as keep the departing team afloat. Also, the games are affordable, well-written, relatively short, and often quite moving. If this studio’s games have ever intrigued you, there is no better time to buy them.
I can’t help but feel that this is a sign of worse things to come. We all know that the state of the games industry is very bad right now.Executives made awful financial decisions during the pandemic gaming boom, and now we are seeingthe consequences of those actions. Revenue is slumping industry-wide,people are getting laid off en masse, andprojects big and small are getting cancelled across the board. It is incredibly difficult for independent studios to get funding in this environment. Die Gute Fabrik isn’t the first well-loved independent studio to shutter under these conditions, and worse, it won’t be the last. This will affect the diversity of games in the wider market, and we are all the worse for it.
