The creator of Hyper Light Breaker opens up about the stress of being dependent on a publisher in the corporate carousel of acquisitions, layoffs and closures: “I don’t know who I’ll be working with in a few months”

Hyper Light Breaker, the upcoming sequel to Hyper Light Drifter, is one of those sequels that pushes the limits of what’s possible. The ambition is simple: take the pristine vibes and stylish combat of the top-down isometric original and make it all bigger and better in full 3D. The game is scheduled to be released in early access this year, although no specific date is known yet considering what we played there’s a good chance that developer Heart Machine will make it happen.

The difference in scale between the original and Hyper Light Breaker, however, meant one big change for the studio. It self-published its first game and was quite successful, but a much longer development cycle and a larger team meant that this time it had to sign with a publisher to get the project finalized. It’s normal for now. Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that publishers are the industry’s greatest evil: they are often the reason teams take such risks.

But perhaps the time has come when studios are looking at their publishers like never before. Not because of their interpersonal relationships or the people he works with, but the simple fact of what the gaming industry is going through a terrible period of layoffs, closing the studioAND appeals. It’s not a good time for anyone to be dependent on one of the publishing giants, and mood music among independent creators is incredibly low.

In the run-up to the premiere of Heart Machine, he participated in a documentary by an outstanding director No clipduring which studio founder and Creative Director of Hyper Light Breaker, Alx Preston, talks about the anxieties of living in the corporate money carousel and closures that may one day drop an anvil on you (first spotted by GamesRadar+).

The thing is, Heart Machine now has its third publisher in four years, but not because anything has changed. The Hyper Light Drifter team initially signed a contract with publisher Perfect World, which became part of the Gearbox Publishing label after being purchased by Embracer in 2022. When Embracer started going into skids sold Gearbox, best known for Borderlands, to Take-Two for $460 million, while making a massive hairstyle. However, Gearbox Publishing was not part of this deal, so the rights remained with Embracer and are now owned by Arc Games.

Yes, it’s quite confusing. “I don’t want to rely on mega-corporations doing X, Y and Z to dictate our future one way or another, as much as I can to prevent that from happening,” Preston says, recalling the moment he signed the game contract, “but sometimes you get caught in the crossfire.” Preston says Heart Machine “didn’t expect” Perfect World would be sold to “any other company, ever” when it signed that deal: “until Embracer came along, no one had even thought about it or considered it.”

“I think in most scenarios Heart Machine will be fine no matter how it turns out,” Preston says. “There are scripts that aren’t very great. There are many things going on behind the scenes that we have no say or control over. These are people we’ve been working with for over two years, so it’s generally a stressful change in itself: “I don’t know who I’ll be working with in a few months.” It might be Gearbox San Francisco, but I don’t know if they’re the same people or not.”

The developer hits a memorable line to discuss the impact this has on the games being made, pointing out that behind-the-scenes changes can be incredibly destabilizing for complex, long-term projects that depend on a group of people with specific skills: and that while, of course, people feel the worst part of the situation, it also affects those who keep their jobs, seeing former colleagues and friends go through hell.

“It’s a cascading effect throughout the industry where it’s not just people who are being laid off, it’s teams,” Preston says. “Maybe this project still exists, but now you don’t have the resources you used to have, you have to reformat, restructure this project in one way or another, or cancel it because you simply don’t have the people anymore. And that’s it. in a way it’s really debilitating or demeaning because you work on this thing for a year, two years, maybe longer in some cases, and you never announce it and you’re really excited and everything’s going well, and then it’s gone.”

It should be said that NoClip shot this documentary in 2023 while Embracer was actively trying to offload Gearbox, and Preston’s comments are undated. The document was released three days ago.

Ultimately, while it looks like Hyper Light Breaker isn’t in a good place ahead of its release, it can be argued that it’s ignorance that’s eating away at Heart Machine.

“I think about all the possibilities that could happen with Gearbox,” Preston says, “whether the money goes into marketing, scheduling… that’s the hardest part. Maybe we’ll get more money for marketing, I just don’t know.” In such an environment, he realizes the futility of overthinking things that the Heart Machine has no control over. All the control they have is focused on one thing: “We try to focus on making the game as good as possible.”