I don't know who funds games like Hyper Light Drifter anymore
One of indie gaming's most decorated studios did everything right for thirteen years, and what happened to it anyway should terrify anyone who loves strange little games.
Heart Machine — the studio whose 2016 debut sits on every "games are art, actually" syllabus — laid off nearly its entire staff on September 16. Not because a game flopped. Because a publisher pulled the money out of an unannounced, fully funded, in-production title, mid-development, and there was nothing underneath.
Founder Alx Preston announced it on LinkedIn with the kind of honesty studio heads usually outsource to a comms team:
"I'm not sure yet how or if Heart Machine survives."
And I keep turning over the obvious question: if this studio can't get funded, who can?
They tried every model. All of them.
This is not a story about a team that bet everything on one game and lost. Heart Machine spent thirteen years diversifying like a responsible adult, and every single revenue stream got shot down in sequence:
- Crowdfunding: Hyper Light Drifter began as a Kickstarter that asked for $27,000 and raised over $600,000. That era of indie funding is a museum exhibit now.
- Prestige publisher: Solar Ash shipped in 2021 with Annapurna Interactive — whose entire staff later walked out in 2024, which tells you what shape that pipeline is in.
- Early Access: Hyper Light Breaker launched into Early Access in January 2025 with Arc Games, underwhelmed, and had its development shut down that October — the studio itself citing "shifts in funding, corporate consolidation" as the forces it couldn't outrun. It never saw 1.0.
- Revenue share: Possessor(s) came out in November 2025 via Devolver, scored a respectable 71, and its rev-share still pays the laid-off developers who worked on it.
- Patreon, even: a short-lived subscription experiment that shut down earlier this year.
Five models. Five dead ends. The publisher-funded unannounced game was lifeline number six, and a publisher can sever that one with a single meeting.
The graveyard is getting crowded
Heart Machine isn't an outlier; it's the trend line. In 2026 alone, Oxenfree's Night School Studio, Wanderstop's Ivy Road, and Moss's Polyarc have all shut down. These are not failed studios. These are studios with beloved, critically adored catalogs, discovering that a beloved, critically adored catalog buys you exactly nothing when publishers retreat to sequels and annualized comfort food.
The market's current message to mid-size indies: be a solo dev with zero overhead, or be Fortnite. The forty-person studio making strange, beautiful games — the exact tier Heart Machine defined — is the tier being liquidated.
When Possessor(s) shipped last fall amid an earlier layoff wave, narrative director Tyler Hutchison begged players on Steam:
"As a developer who is slated for lay off – PLEASE BUY THIS GAME!"
That's the funding model now. That's the whole model. Possessor(s) is still for sale, the revenue share still routes to the people who made it, and Preston says what's left of Heart Machine will keep pushing to find a path while it still exists.
Previously we wrote: Build A Rocket Boy spied on its own staff and still couldn't ship
