GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Black Tabby Games, the two-person studio behind the hit indie games Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow, is getting into indie publishing. The publishing arm, which was revealed on Thursday, is called Black Tabby Publishing and has already signed deals for two games: Prove You’re Human, the next title from 1000xResist developer Sunset Visitor, and a yet-to-be-announced game from the “animation duo” SmallBü.
“Bluntly, as indies, we’re not fans of the current publishing landscape,” Black Tabby Publishing cofounder Tony Howard-Arias tells The Verge. “I think that deals are too aggressive. I think that publishers do not offer actual meaningful support to studios. But he and Abby Howard, Black Tabby’s other cofounder (the two are a married couple), didn’t decide to get into publishing until hearing from Sunset Visitor founder Remy Siu about how difficult it was pitching his next project. Howard-Arias and Howard “half jokingly” asked Siu to walk them through the pitch, and “it was such a good pitch that we wound up deciding to sign it and spin up a separate company.”
A screenshot from Prove You’re Human, the new game from Sunset Visitor. Image: Black Tabby Publishing
Howard-Arias says that the publishing arm “is not a solution to the state of the industry. This is a specific approach that is tailored to the niche we’re working in.” Black Tabby Publishing was able to accept Sunset Visitor’s game, Prove You’re Human, because “1000xResist was made, was successful, was delivered in a timely manner, and was excellent. That put us in a very specific position where we could extend this much trust for our partner.“
Black Tabby Publishing will give “mid-six-figure USD deals to give small teams flexibility without hinging their survival on explosive launch performance,” according to a press release. When Black Tabby Publishing funds a game it will take 70 percent of the game’s gross revenue (after Steam takes its cut) ahead of recouping its costs and the developers will get 30 percent. After costs are recouped, that flips. And three years after a game’s launch, the rights to the game revert back to the developer. (By comparison, that’s shorter than the seven-year terms offered by Innersloth’s Outersloth publishing house.) The Black Tabby Publishing contract also has a clause forbidding the usage of generative AI, according to Howard-Arias.
“I think, at the end of the day, good art does sell,” Howard-Arias says. “People want good games.” With leaner teams like Sunset Visitor and SmallBü, “it doesn’t cost $50 or $100 million to make something. You don’t need to sell 1,000,000 copies just to recoup your costs.” Howard adds, “You can make your niche art for a niche audience.”
Black Tabby Games’ main revenue stream will still be its own games. (In February, it announced that Slay the Princess has sold more than 1 million copies.) The studio views the publishing arm less as a fully self-sustaining second business and more as “a mechanism we can use to help lift other people up so that they can be self-sufficient,” Howard-Arias says. Their dream is that “anyone we sign a game with never comes to us or anyone else for a future project because they can just fund their own thing.”