Indies pushing back

A new game called Prove You’re Human showed up at the Triple-i Initiative showcase on April 9, but the stranger part was the business deal behind it: Sunset Visitor, the studio behind 1000xRESIST, is making it, and Black Tabby Games, the two-person team behind Slay the Princess, is publishing it. (gizmodo.com) (iii-initiative.com) Black Tabby did not exist as a publisher a week ago in public. Its new publishing page says it now has two signed games, including Prove You’re Human and an unannounced title from SmallBu animation. (blacktabbygames.com) That is a sharp break from the usual indie path, where a small studio spends years pitching a publisher, gives up a chunk of revenue, and often gives up leverage too. Black Tabby says its label is “boutique,” and outside reporting says it is avoiding long recoup structures and is not keeping intellectual property rights. (blacktabbygames.com) (indie-games.eu) The timing is not random. The 2026 State of the Game Industry survey from the Game Developers Conference said 28% of respondents were laid off in the past two years, and 50% said their current or most recent employer conducted layoffs in the past 12 months. (gdconf.com) Narrative teams got hit especially hard in the 2025 version of that same survey, where 19% of narrative workers said they had been laid off in the past year. That matters here because both 1000xRESIST and Slay the Princess built their names on writing, voice, and structure instead of blockbuster-scale art pipelines. (gdconf.com) (store.steampowered.com) Sunset Visitor is not a giant studio trying to spin up a side business. Its Steam developer page describes the team as creators coming from experimental performing arts, and 1000xRESIST was its breakout game before this week’s reveal. (store.steampowered.com 1) (store.steampowered.com 2) Black Tabby is even smaller. The studio behind Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow is run by Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias, and it is now trying to turn one hit maker into a support system for other story-heavy teams. (blacktabbygames.com) (gamedeveloper.com) The showcase where this happened also fits the pattern. The Triple-i Initiative describes itself as “a bunch of studios banding together” for a trailer-only event with “no ads” and “no host,” which is basically the marketing version of indies building their own road instead of waiting for a giant platform holder to hand them a slot. (iii-initiative.com) Prove You’re Human itself is a first-person narrative science-fiction game about interrogating an artificial intelligence named Mesa that believes she is human, and the Steam page says you play as Santana, who splits their consciousness in two. Even the game pitch is about identity, control, and systems deciding what counts as real. (store.steampowered.com) (gizmodo.com) So the news is not just that one more indie game got announced on April 9. It is that two studios known for weird, literary games are trying to keep more control inside the part of the business that usually strips control away. (gizmodo.com) (blacktabbygames.com) If this works, the model is simple enough to copy: one successful indie uses money, audience, and trust from its own game to publish the next studio’s game on friendlier terms. In a year when the industry’s default story is cuts, closures, and consolidation, that is a very different kind of sequel. (gamedeveloper.com) (gdconf.com)