Devolver Digital have been big fans of PAX Australia for many years now and they kept that relationship going in 2025. The main focus of the show this year was Cult of the Lamb and their upcoming Woolhaven expansion, but I was able to spend a bit of time chatting with Graeme Struthers once again.

Graeme and I chatted last year and I was keen this year to pick his brain on a number of topics, but I had to start with the most pressing question.

Maxi-Geek: All right, here we go. The first question is, have you managed to get Vagrant Story rights from Square Enix yet?

Graeme Struthers: I was talking about that last week with Danny. No, disappointingly, no. Yeah, the quest goes on. The quest goes on.

MG: A quest is a good thing to do. Devolver in the last months has seen a lot of games released. You've got a few coming up, you've got BALL x PIT this this week coming, Possesser(s) in November, but how's the past 12 months been for Devolver, are you excited for what you've had?

GS: Yeah, I think not just us, but I think a lot of companies, I've got friends who work for Team 17 and Raw Fury and I think we all felt like in ‘23 and ‘24, it felt like new IP wasn't really working as well as it had done previously. We were putting out some, what we considered to be, games we were super happy with and they were doing okay, but they weren't really doing what we thought they might and it was a little bit of a moment where we were thinking, what's going on, right?

We'd also seen other things happening where games we'd released maybe five, six years ago, we could see people were spending more time playing those games, the hours being played were going up. So, it was like a bit of a moment where you're thinking, what's the world telling us? Is new and original IP not really what people are looking for? So, we were a bit worried and I know that friends and other companies were feeling the same.

Well, this year we've launched new IP, and they've all done better than we had hoped. It feels like, oh God, thank God we're back. Yeah, so it's been a good year. We've had games like Look Outside, Mycopunk, you know, the small teams, and they've really just found their niche and they're doing really well yeah and that's been super encouraging um yeah so, this year it feels like okay we're good.

MG: I suppose too like outside of Devolver sort of the more independent developers seem to be getting a lot more attention this year like with Clair Obscur Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight: Silksong, so I feel like the industry has kind of shifted away from the big AAA's and they're looking for more unique experiences.

GS: I hope so, it's really interesting, like there's games that have come from nowhere, no I mean Silksong didn't come from nowhere but there's games that you literally read about them and then two, three months later they're being released and they're selling really well. I always feel that indie games will always give you much more innovation by the very nature of how they're made. I think if you're in that world of AAA, or as Nigel redefined it, Quintuple A, that you are incrementally improving. But the sheer scale of those games, I don't know how you do it.

MG: Exactly, they have their recipe and they don’t change it much. Now BALL x PIT is out next and I put maybe 30 hours into for review. Has it surprised you, the reaction to that game, given that it's essentially just Breakout from the 70s?

GS: I don't think this will surprise you. So, when a game gets signed, by the time it's been signed, most people have either played a demo or had the game fully explained to them and you kind of go along with it right, your kind of like oh great this sounds amazing. When the BALL x PIT build became truly playable, one of the guys at the Devolver his name is Luke Vernon, he runs all of our dev, he was like I'm losing my weekends and I know that he's now north of 100 hours in.

But that started to spread around the company all the people were like ‘yeah I’ve been playing it, I can't stop playing it’. It felt to me, personally, a bit like Loop Hero, where I had to uninstall the demo because it's like you can't ignore it. You can't go ‘I've got five minutes’. So yeah, this one has definitely had all of that going forward. We originally were only going to do this game, launch it on PC, see how it goes and we shared it with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo and the feedback we got from all three was like, ‘please, you know, consider bringing it to our platforms’, which we are. When you look at that game, it reminds me of Loop Hero for the same reason. It doesn't look incredible, it doesn't look something that would make you stop and look twice. But as soon as you play it, you're like, Oh my god, I'm...

MG: Yeah. The PR team were trying to hype it up at the start of the year. Like, I played this game, you're gonna love it and I was like, okay. Then when he sent the demo through, I lost hours for that demo, and I'm like... This is like a 15-minute demo, right? It's not supposed to have this much replayability, but it just does. Making it quite the welcome surprise.

GS: Yep.

MG: I wanted to ask too, Possessor(s) is out in November and obviously Heart Machine just announced their layoffs and project closure. When you see a developer that sort of has these sort of issues, do you think, oh, we could help out, but it's not our area, but we really would like to.

GS: We knew, you know, obviously with Heart Machine, we've been working with them now. I'm going to say this will be year three. When they launched Hyper Light Breaker, we're hoping that it goes well for them and when it wasn't going well, as they had a lot of turmoil around them because their publisher was being sold, so they weren't even sure who they were really going to be dealing with.

That whole fallout probably affected them as well as everything else that was going on. So, when we sat down with them and going back to GDC this year, we were kind of like, How are you? Because no matter how well a game does, we still worked very hard to get it out. At that point, they were optimistic about the future for the game and how they could develop it and fix the things that people had maybe not found great. But they were in this absolute bubble of uncertainty, they didn't know if their publisher was going to be up for that. I think, unfortunately, in their case, they landed with a launch in the worst situation with regards to where their publisher was and they were very complimentary about the people they were working with, but those people were uncertain. So, it's sad news, because they're a tight team, and I know that I actually worked really hard to try and keep everything going

MG: Last year we talked about Big Fan and you've now released Tron: Catalyst. How's the reception for Big Fan been?

GS: So, this year, there was two games that came out, Tron and Morai and they were the last two games that had been signed by the previous team. But also, this year, Big Fan released the first game that the new team signed, which was Monster Train 2, and that's been a huge success, couldn't be happier and I think for the new team, that's like a breath of fresh air. It validates them, and there's nothing like a good successful launch to revitalize things and next year they've got Warhammer Boltgun 2, which the developer, Auroch Digital they're based in the UK, they're a delight to work with. So, I think the Big Fan team are now seeing, it's validated, the first game's gone really well. We've got Boltgun II on the way, a couple of other things we have yet to announce. So yeah, it's feeling good, but it's not been an easy journey for them.

MG: Yeah, but they've finally got that traction with that first game. Now they're picking up speed. With regards to Boltgun, I don't like Warhammer. I don't find the universe that appealing, but I loved Boltgun, so I'm very excited for Boltgun 2. Was that game coming to you guys something that they went after or was that more of the developers sort of...

GS: There's always bits and pieces of... So, we met Nina (Adams) who runs the studio probably... I'm going to say three years ago, just after Boltgun had launched and was doing really, really well. Like any good studio boss, she's looking at opportunities and obviously Warhammer were really happy as well. We met and at that particular point when we were talking, we were just in the process of forming Big Fan. Lincoln was joining to run that label. So, we had conversations at that time, but at that time her studio was owned by Sumo Digital and they were looking to do a bigger deal than just one game. They wanted to do a bundle deal and we were like, that's not us and nothing wrong with the thinking, it's just not what we do. So that was that and then maybe another year passes and Sumo's situation changes and Auroch, were coming out of that relationship. So, we're like, well, we're still here and yeah, we started those conversations and it went really quickly.

MG: Fantastic. Now as you're on the business side of things, you see a lot of games, some you guys sign, some you guys don't sign. What do you personally look for in a game? What excites you when you see something?

GS: I mean, the honest answer is it's the developer. You know, the enthusiasm and the energy that they can bring... You know, we were here yesterday at the Play Now, you know, the Vic Screen event. I think we had eight meetings with developers and it was myself, Bridie, and Danny who were doing that together. We were just like, the energy, the enthusiasm, and also meeting developers who have a very firm idea of the game they're making and that might sound a bit odd, but sometimes you'll meet developers and they're kind of like a little bit here, a little bit here, and a little bit there. They're almost like, they're not 100% committed to the genre, or what they're doing in that genre so they're a little bit vague and that will always make us say ‘well if you're not sure what you want to do’. So, I think it's the developer's certainty of the thing they want to make, obviously them explaining to you and hopefully with a build that you can play and see how that's going to progress to being the game.

MG: What games have you been playing this year? Outside of your own things.

GS: Well, I got my Switch 2 so I've been playing a lot of Kirby, I've yet to get to Donkey Kong but other than Devolver and Big Fan, it's been Switch, I haven't touched anything else. I'm guilty of that I still tend to just play what we're doing for the most part.

MG: I also wanted to ask, you've been to PAX Australia a few times now?

GS: Yeah.

MG: What do you think of the vibe here? Do you love it?

GS: I absolutely love it. When we first started doing PAX, in the very early days of Devolver, we were doing PAX West in Seattle and in those days we had the Indie Megabooth, which was an absolutely fantastic space. It allowed a lot of people to get their games into an environment where both media and potential fans could play. You'd have 25-30 developers and when that fell away, because maybe the commercials didn't work any longer, I'm not sure exactly why, but when it fell away, it kind of hollowed out PAX, in terms of packs in Seattle and Boston.

This one here has been almost like going the other direction. You've got so many indie devs here, actually some are being curated by various groups, we've got devs here from New Zealand, devs here from Tasmania, and all over Australia. So over there, there's about 40 different things to go and look at, which for us is like a paradise. And as well as what Vic Screen are doing, yesterday I think there were 70 different developers there. We only got to hang with 8. But that's really encouraging for an indie publisher. This is like a version of paradise. Don't tell everyone else though.

MG: The only other question I really wanted to ask you is development costs and timelines are going up. When you're looking, Skate Story just got its date confirmed today, finally. When you're looking at developers and they give you a timeline and they don't meet it, does that annoy you from a business side of things? Or are you like, we understand that these things do take time and effort and these timelines do shift. Like how do you feel about, extended or protracted development timelines?

GS: Very quickly, in the case of Skate Story, Kenny, he's a solo dev, he's also a skateboarder. So last year he broke his arm. Sometimes games get pushed out because of us. You know, we might look at the game and in the first blush we're thinking, okay, Steam, But as we get further in, we might be thinking, hey, this feels like it could also be valid on consoles. So we might be the reason for extending that dev cycle.

But I think most of the games we're working with, the teams are quite small and what we would always look at is, like yesterday you meet developers that play now and they're saying, ‘hey, if we can get this funding in place, we'll have this game in Q1 2027’. But they going to take any time out? Any vacations? Do you think you're going to maybe, oh no. Well, you can't work like that. But the developer will equate that to more funding is needed, right? So they're very happy. You always have to sort of like find a way of getting the developer to tell you the truth because they want to be the most optimistic in the room. Also, game dev is a complex thing, but what we've tried to do is work with them to say, okay, you're saying 18 months, we think it's 24. We should schedule for 24 and inside it, we might be thinking, we're going to say 24, but we're probably thinking more like 28.

MG: Ok, interesting.

GS: Then you have all the things that affect everybody. You have ill health, you have stress, you have people having babies. We've had so many devs during development that they become a father or a mother. It's like, oh, this is another thing. So I think for the most part, our experience with devs is that they're very sincere and genuine. I don't think we've ever been in a relationship where we felt that we've been actively misled. In fact, generally speaking, it's been a voyage of discovery. But I think what we've learned is not to announce games until we're at Alpha or around that, because then you know, okay, we're within the last year, whereas previously we'd be excited, but hey, we announced the Skate Story two years before.

MG: Following on from that with the timelines and stuff, do you find that solo devs or smaller teams are more honest than larger teams? Or is it just varies from studio to studio?

GS: Well, I mean, ironically with a solo dev, you've only got one point of contact. So I think in a strange way, that just means that they are more on top of what's going on, right? It's like it's a solo... I don't think there's any one size fits all. If it's a single player game, you know, narrative based, linear, you're always going to be much more likely to get you're scheduling reasonably done. If it's a game like Mycopunk, it's inherently complex. It will never be easy to schedule those kind of games because also you're reacting to player feedback. So I think our experience allows us to look at that and go like, ‘Hey, you're pitching us this. That game is going to have to work across five different platforms with Cloud Save, with ability to content update, that's going to take me way longer and have more risk’.

MG: Fair enough and then you go and do something crazy like just release a random DLC for Terra Nil out of nowhere.

GS: Well, one thing about Free Lives who we love is that they will never not be Free Lives. We often find out what's going on with them just about a week before you do.

MG: I suppose it keeps you on your toes. It's a bit of excitement.

GS: I mean, we love working with those guys, but they are charmingly, chaotically brilliant. They really are.

MG: Fair enough.

GS: But you wouldn't want to change the mood to them.

MG: No, I like what they do.

I want to thank Graeme once again for taking the time to answer my insane questions and giving a little insight to what makes Devolver Digital and their relationships with the studios they work with tick.