Getting your video game funded has never exactly been easy, but it’s become especially hard in the past few years, as publishers and investors reverse their COVID-era extravagance. Even small amounts of funding can be hard to secure – but looking for funding above $1 million is near-impossible.

Publishers including Devolver Digital and 11-Bit Studios have said they’re now looking to focus on smaller titles. “There’s less investment on the line, so you can do things that are a little more outside the box,” said Nigel Lowrie, co-founder and marketing lead of Devolver, in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “There’s less risk, both for us and for the developer.” The underlying trend seems to be publishers investing small amounts of funding in a larger number of micro indies – in the hope that at least one of them will make it Balatro-big – rather than piling all their cash into a handful of bigger games.

“The majority are going for the scattershot [approach],” says Brooke Burgess, who is seeking around $1.5 million for his game Fallen. He took part in an open pitch event at DevGAMM Lisbon in November, which he says went well, but he has yet to close a deal. “I was approached by a lot of people afterwards,” he says, plenty of whom offered positive comments. But the overall message was that anything above $500,000 was out of the comfort zone of potential investors.

There has been interest in the game. Burgess notes that some publishers – particularly ones known for action adventure games with mature themes – have said Fallen is right within their wheelhouse. Yet none has, so far, followed kind words with cash. “They’re like, ‘Let’s revisit this in a bit’,” says Burgess.

The game itself is a mix of combat and exploration inspired by titles like Hyper Light Drifter, Tunic, and Death’s Door, starring an angel called Astra who is sent to hell to shut it down. “And what is revealed is this conspiracy about the construction of hell itself, and why it exists,” explains Burgess, with the game ultimately questioning the nature of good and evil. Along the way, Astra has the option of forgiving or condemning the souls she meets: Condemning them will give Astra a buff and extra abilities, while forgiving them will send the soul back up to heaven and forge a link with a powerful archangel who acts like the summons in Final Fantasy. Abandoning them, meanwhile, can unlock secret paths and hidden bosses.

There’s also something refreshingly old school about Fallen – tonally, it’s reminiscent of Xbox 360-era classics like Darksiders and Dante’s Inferno, and the aim is to provide a “self-contained, awesome single player experience that isn’t going to be 40, 50, 60 hours of time, because no one has that anymore,” says Burgess. And judging by the barnstorming success of the similarly old-school Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 in 2024, there is a healthy audience for exactly this kind of game.

But the budget is the sticking point, and Burgess says that one thing which has worried investors is that this is his first time in the director’s chair. “There’s a little nervousness about that.” Not that he lacks industry experience: Burgess began his career as a producer at EA in the late 1990s, and has worked as a narrative consultant and writer for years across multiple projects. “The challenge, of course, is right now the landscape of the industry, where people are nervous about spending. The purse strings are a little bit tight.”

A reasonable ask

To fund a game of this scope, $1.5 million isn’t a huge amount. In Burgess’s business plan, it equates to a small team working for around two and a half years, bringing on extra talent as needed for things like art support, localization, and marketing. Burgess has even thought about transmedia opportunities, like the potential for comics, animations, novels, and merchandise.

But, in an indication of just how hard it is to find funding these days, no one is biting.

Burgess says he’s been dealing with smaller private financing for about 18 months, and actively courting publishers and larger investors for around seven months, but despite being “under review” with a handful of them, he’s still far from a deal.

“I think that people follow the zeitgeist and they’re like, ‘Hey, everyone wants open world or everyone wants a souls-like’… Or now people are like, ‘Oh, maybe we can do JRPGs in the Expedition 33 style’,” says Burgess. But his chief motivation is simply making the kind of game that he’d want to play.

Right now, Fallen is at the demo stage. “I would say pre-vertical slice,” says Burgess. “It’s in this kind of middle space where there are some things that are clearly work in progress or placeholder to see how it feels, and there are things that are very far along.”

The project started life several years ago, when Burgess got in touch with his old mentor at EA, Scott Blackwood, who was executive producer on the Skate series, but had since retired. “He was the one who said, ‘You know what? I’m sick of doing nothing, I was too young to retire, pitch me something’,” says Burgess. “And I pitched him a few things over the years, but Fallen was the one that made him go, ‘I love this’.”

Blackwood supplied some funding for a prototype, but then in 2023, he passed away. “So I’ve been carrying the flag ever since,” says Burgess. He adds that Blackwood’s idea was to search for funding via the private venture capital route, using his industry connections. “He was saying, ‘If we can maybe bypass publishers and get an angel who gets it on board, that might be the way to go, because publishing is having some real challenges’. And this was back three years ago when we were first talking about the project. I think he was already seeing which way the wind was blowing.”

Burgess has even considered crowdfunding, but he says that the appetite for original IP among audiences has waned over the past decade, after they’ve been burned by unfinished or unsatisfactory crowdfunded projects. Nowadays he believes that “nostalgia is king” in the crowdfunding world, which tends to be focused on spinoffs of established IP.

Nevertheless, he thinks a hybrid crowdfunding model could be an option. “If a publisher says, ‘Hey, if you can raise X amount, then we’ll match it,’ then absolutely, that’s on the table.”

His conversations with publishers have routinely returned to a single topic: AI. “Every publisher I’ve talked to has brought up: ‘So, have you thought about how AI might be able to save money on this?’ Almost all of them. They want to know that you’re thinking about it, that you understand the potential.”

Accordingly, in an attempt to reduce the budget, Burgess has earmarked AI for use in localization support and QA, as well as animating some of the Renaissance-style paintings found in hell. That said, he’s far from a true AI believer. “I’m not waving the flag of AI by any stretch, because I’ve seen some awful outputs from some of my own work,” he says. “I would never allow AI to write any dialogue, ever.”

Instead, it’s all about getting that budget down to a level potential funders might accept. Burgess reckons that without any AI use, he would be having to ask for around $1.8 million, rather than $1.5 million. But there are limits to how far he’s willing to go. “I’m not going to sell my soul and be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it by myself, let me prompt this whole game into existence’. No, I want to work with really talented people and make something cool. But if integrating it in a way that doesn’t affect creativity, but helps to save a little bit of money and gets the game out there to people, and gives us a chance to make something cool and memorable, and then make something else after that – it’s something I have to factor in.”

Fittingly, given the subject of Fallen itself, it’s akin to a deal with the devil. But at this point, after a months-long, fruitless search for funding, the frustration is setting in.

“I just want to make the damn game,” Burgess sighs.