When Raw Fury was founded in Stockholm a decade ago, it was as an “un-publisher”. It would “treat people like people”, would be “for happiness over profit”, and would respect videogames as “art”, granting them the same status as other, more established media. This particular approach, it said, would tip the balance more in favour of developers, allowing them to “find success, be happy, and stay independent”. It has broken some old rules along the way – not least when it revealed the specifics of its publishing deals publicly, for anyone to scrutinise – while releasing a succession of hits including the Kingdom series, Sable, Norco, Cassette Beasts and, most recently, the sublime Blue Prince. As the company arrives at its tenth anniversary, we meet with its leaders to ask if Raw Fury has delivered on its big promises.

BY JULIAN BENSON

On April 21, 2015, Jónas Antonsson and two fellow Paradox alums – Gordon Van Dyke and David Martinez – revealed Raw Fury. In the announcement, they called it “a new breed of publisher for boutique and indie games”. More than that, they said they were in the business of “un-publishing – in the sense of trying to dismantle how publishing traditionally works, in favour of actually being there for the developers”.

In the decade since, they’ve published an eclectic portfolio of games, jumping between genres and styles. Their first game, Kingdom, was a sidescrolling minimalist RTS in which you play as a monarch expanding their settlement and fighting off nightly raids by squat ghouls in masks. Their second title was ’90s-style point-and-click mystery Kathy Rain, filled with clever puzzles and a twist-laden plot. Also finding a home in the catalogue is open-world sci-fi explorer Sable, citybuilding toybox Townscaper, the Pokémon-like Cassette Beasts, and an adventure game set in the surreal world of Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories. But a varied portfolio does not a dismantling of traditional videogame publishing make.

The founders of Raw Fury believe two things set the company apart from other publishers: its relationship with developers, and the contracts it makes them sign.

“There had been a lot of innovation in games, and this is an industry where the pace is frantic,” Antonsson says of the years leading up to Raw Fury’s founding. The early 2010s were marked by the transition from physical to digital and the proliferation of game engines that suited smaller development teams. Unity and GameMaker were on the rise, and Epic changed to a subscription model that favoured small developers, giving them access to the full version of Unreal Engine for less than $20 per month.

Raw Fury co-founder Jónas Antonsson

Meanwhile, Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct created a viable path for developers to self-publish on PC gaming’s most prominent storefront, and Kickstarter found its momentum in 2012, with Double Fine becoming the first videogame developer to raise over $1m, opening the doors to a crowd of veteran studios that did the same. In their wake came smaller, younger teams raising funds for their first commercial projects.

RAW FURY WOULD WRITE A NEW DEAL FOR GAME DEVELOPERS. BUT FIRST IT NEEDED A GAME TO PUBLISH

To some, all this opportunity for indies looked like the death of the traditional game-publishing model. Antonsson certainly saw problems on the horizon. As the founder of casual-game studio Gogogic and later in the role as Paradox’s vice president of mobile, he had seen the promise and challenges of mobile gaming firsthand. “There had been a blue ocean, and in just a few years things were red and scary with sharks,” he says now.

Discoverability would become the number one issue for all these small developers vying for attention and sales. “This would start happening on every platform,” he says. While new routes to market were opened for small teams, Antonsson identified a growing need for “someone with a detailed understanding of how to cut through the noise”.

He could also see that traditional publishers wouldn’t be the ones to do it. “The publishing models that existed at that time were archaic,” Antonsson recalls. “They didn’t fit small, nimble teams, both in how relationships were managed and in the terms [of the contracts] themselves. Their terms and publishing agreements came from an environment where you are shifting boxes. They are tied to those sorts of logistics. You try to apply that to developers who are just a single person making a game, and it just doesn’t make sense.” Raw Fury would write a new deal for game developers. But first it needed a game to publish.