In an interview at last week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the developers of the indie favorites "Slay the Spire" and "Darkest Dungeon" said that in recent years, the Epic Game Store exclusives and Smaller developers who have come to rely on deals like Xbox Game Pass for funding said it is no longer what it used to be.

"During GDC, we spoke at least five times with small teams of 35 people or less: cuts, cuts, cuts, funding cancellations, cancellations of discussions that had been going on for a year," said Casey Yano, co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit . 'It's a shitty deal. We are definitely very fortunate to be self-financed. [Otherwise] I'm very, very, very scared right now."

Slay the Spire was released in Early Access on Steam, but sales were slow and it eventually became a deck-building blockbuster. Darkest Dungeon was similarly successful on Steam Early Access. Both games are available on PC Game Pass, but DD Director Chris Bourassa said that Microsoft's deals to get the games on Game Pass have "narrowed in scope"

since the subscription service began.

"It's gone down quite a bit," Yano added.

"So is Epic," Bourassa said. The gold rush is over. I'm from the Northwest Territories. My home town was built on gold, and diamonds were found further north. Maybe there is another paradigm shift waiting in the wings, but I think the scale of the trade I hear about has definitely shrunk significantly from the days of the great shakeout. Certainly, we got the epic (deal) at the right time."

Red Hook Studios, the developer of Darkest Dungeon, made the somewhat controversial choice to release the sequel as an Epic exclusive with early access. While such exclusives are not popular with players, they allow some indie developers to "break even" on their games even before release, a safety net that cannot be overlooked when the success of a game can determine the survival of a small studio The success of a game can determine the survival of a small studio, so this is a safety net that should not be overlooked.

To help boost the indie scene, Red Hook and Mega Crit teamed up with Dead Cells DLC studio Evil Empire, along with other developers such as Re-Logic and poncle, to host a "Triple I" showcase on April 10.