2025 was a really dangerous 12 months for Mike Bithell. In August, he introduced that the majority of full-time employees had been being let go from Bithell Video games, with 11 jobs being made redundant.
Bithell rose to prominence as one among the wave of outspoken indie creators in the early 2010s, releasing his breakout hit Thomas Was Alone in 2012. He adopted that up with the stealth recreation Quantity in 2015, together with the “Bithell Shorts” Subsurface Round and Quarantine Round. However then Bithell Video games began to take on greater, licensed properties, starting with John Wick Hex in 2019 and adopted by a collaboration with Disney on Tron: Id and Tron: Catalyst, launched in 2023 and 2025, respectively. The corporate’s headcount grew.
Finally, it did not work out. John Wick Hex did properly, promoting almost 450,000 models throughout Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, in accordance to estimates from Video Sport Insights. However the Tron video games bombed. VGI reckons that Tron: Catalyst offered solely round 16,000 models throughout Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox (the recreation was additionally launched on Change, for which figures aren’t out there). VGI knowledge for Tron: Id are even decrease – slightly below 9,000 models for Steam (once more, Change gross sales are unavailable).
Given these numbers, it is little shock that the firm had to downsize. Bithell Video games is now simply three folks: “myself, Alexander [Sliwinski] my enterprise companion, and a advertising and marketing individual,” Bithell tells GamesIndustry.biz. He is frank about the awfulness of the scenario he confronted final summer season.
“It sucked,” he says. “It was a really proficient crew. They had been fucking superior. They had been the greatest folks I’ve ever labored with.”
.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp)
Getting back from that dreadful summer season has been laborious. “It was a short while earlier than I obtained began once more,” says Bithell. “However I distract myself by coding, and that weirdly ended up being one thing fascinating.” That bizarre one thing is Vampirium 1997, an immersive sim through which Dracula is the King of England (the similarity to Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels is fully coincidental, Bithell says – he wasn’t conscious of Newman’s books).
“I wanted a mission simply from a ‘conserving myself sane’ viewpoint,” explains Bithell. “I made a decision to be taught Godot, as a result of I have been utilizing Unity for all these years and I used to be prepared to attempt one thing else. So simply as a interest factor, I began to play with Godot, after which made prototypes of various issues, as a result of that is how I be taught engines. And one among them, a few months later, became the beginnings of this. Nevertheless it was a troublesome time. It was a extremely powerful time.”
Im-slim
Vampirium 1997, as a small, experimental recreation based mostly on new IP, is the antithesis of working on Disney-licensed titles. “It’s good to have full management and to… not have to fear about the completely affordable issues of main firms,” says Bithell, who’s relishing the freedom to “simply make one thing that feels very me, and to have the opportunity to discuss about it utterly freely and provides sincere, full solutions to what we’re doing with it. I am actually having fun with that facet of it.”
“Proper now I am loving what I am doing,” he provides. “I need to go wherever this recreation takes me. I genuinely think there’s superior potential.”
In Vampirium 1997, the participant is an murderer in the make use of of Dracula. However not like the giants of the immersive sim style like Thief, Deus Ex, or Dishonored, the recreation makes use of a minimalist, top-down method with static character portraits and verb-based decisions. Bithell is asking it an “im-slim”.
“It is taking the risk area, the verbiage, the capacity to work out your personal path via an area of immersive sims, however then abstracting it into this tile-based recreation,” he says.
“I could make a mechanic in a short time, I can add a brand new verb to the recreation in a few days”
It is a daring format to experiment with. Video games in the style are sometimes critically properly obtained, however are not often large sellers, and sometimes take an monumental period of time to produce owing to the complexity of the emergent gameplay. It looks like an terrible lot to take on as a single developer. Is it actually attainable to do an im-slim?
“I hope so,” responds Bithell. “It would be a horrible disgrace if it wasn’t. I think for me, it is very like actual weight-reduction plan. It is about slimming the proper facets of it.”
His technique is to make the visuals of the recreation so simple as attainable whereas placing the majority of improvement time into the recreation’s intricate internet of interactions. “That, to me, is the factor that I care about as a participant of these video games.” Trimming the recreation down to tiles and phrases “frees me up to massively overinvest in the risk area,” he says. “So I could make a mechanic in a short time, I can add a brand new verb to the recreation in a few days. And whenever you evaluate that to should you wished to add a brand new mechanic to a conventional 3D recreation, clearly that is an monumental funding of time.”
.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp)
After all, with one thing like that, the temptation is to all the time maintain including. “As a designer, the type encourages experimentation, it encourages you to maintain increasing,” acknowledges Bithell. “In a conventional 3D surroundings, that is characteristic creep. That is a nightmare in your complete crew. With this recreation although, one thing that begins as a really small concept can scale up and grow to be one thing. And that is the power of this recreation.”
He provides the instance of including a “push” verb in response to a playtester asking why they did not have the choice to push one other character off a balcony. That, in flip, sparked new concepts. Are you able to push characters into objects to injury them? Are you able to shove them into totally different rooms? “That verb that began as the balcony push turns into the shove verb, after which has all of those fascinating tweaks on gameplay elsewhere in the recreation.”
“As a artistic, that is the great things when you may really simply run via an concept and see the place it takes you,” says Bithell. However crucially, the time impression is small – measured in days somewhat than months of additional improvement time.
Threat versus reward
Vampirium 1997 was introduced in early July after solely 9 months in improvement, and with no inkling of a launch date. One may think that the early reveal was a manner to get buyers on board – however that is not the case, says Bithell. “No, we don’t need funding. I don’t need any cash coming in from anybody else.”
Now Bithell Video games has been stripped down to a skeleton employees, he thinks the cash coming in from again catalogue gross sales will likely be enough to maintain the agency for the close to future. “We’re clearly a really low cost firm to run at this level.”
Extra to the level, Bithell questions whether or not buyers could be excited about one thing so unproven. “It’s a very experimental recreation. I think you’d even have a tough time convincing a writer this early that this idea works. We place confidence in it, however it’s a bizarre recreation.”
Extra usually he laments what he sees as danger aversion amongst recreation publishers, with most now solely prepared to fund initiatives as soon as they’re already properly superior. “You could have to persuade the publishers that you’re a positive factor. And the downside is that requires folks both to go into huge debt or to have a beforehand profitable factor. And a number of builders who’re in the place we are – the place we do have a again catalogue and an capacity to maintain for a short while – are taking a look at that scenario and going, ‘Sorry, so why do I would like to go to a writer for the final 20% in change for an monumental minimize of what we would ever make, if they don’t seem to be excited about serving to us to get to the end line? Why would we allow them to take part the enjoyable of really launching the recreation and earning money?’ That appears counterproductive.”
“Why do I would like to go to a writer for the final 20% in change for an monumental minimize?”
He says he understands why publishers have grow to be extra cautious lately, and would not need to “knock all publishers with the similar brush,” however recognises that it has grow to be harder for builders to get new video games off the floor.
“I keep in mind when we had been pitching video games to publishers a decade in the past, you can principally have a very nice doc with nice art work, and a pleasant concept, and a observe document of delivery video games, and you can stroll in and you can get good funding for a superb recreation. However now, in lots of circumstances, you really need to announce the recreation so as to show the viewers is there to get folks to come to you.”
Wise scope
On paper, Vampirium 1997 is a dangerous recreation thanks to its experimental nature and the patchy monetary success of earlier immersive sims. However Bithell is assured. He says it is all about figuring out the acceptable scope for the measurement of the potential viewers – the product/market match.
“The factor that I think different industries are frankly higher than us at doing goes: what is the marketplace for this product? After which making the wonderful, revolutionary step of going, properly, what’s the scale of mission we ought to make for that, then? And I think the place a number of video games go mistaken with immersive sims is that they go, ‘This will likely be the one which crosses over to mainstream AAA, so we will go for an enormous visible flourish, we’ll spend some huge cash on it’.”
.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp)
Bithell is taking the reverse method, making one thing with a really small finances after which seeing whether or not the viewers is there for it earlier than build up. “I think throughout the trade, we don’t think enough about how we match the scope to what we’re making,” he says. “It is the stuff that different industries found out 70 years in the past. I think optimism sadly typically performs too huge a task, and I am very responsible of that. I’ve positively made that mistake in the previous of going, ‘No, this one will likely be the model of this style that completely blows up’.”
“Optimism sadly typically performs too huge a task”
For Vampirium 1997, against this, the intention is to slowly construct curiosity via social media – though Bithell says a key part is the recreation’s mailing checklist, via which he has been releasing chapters of a narrative known as The Misplaced Portrait which is build up the recreation’s lore. “Every part previous is new once more,” he says relating to the sudden reemergence of newsletters. “The locations we’re having success proper now with our advertising and marketing and spreading the phrase are the issues that principally I used to be doing in 2012.”
And though he says there’s been a “vacuum of assist” in the trade since publishers started pulling again from funding early-stage initiatives, he has been heartened to see studios step in to fill the hole. “There’s positively an extended historical past of indies serving to one another out with stuff,” he says. “Individuals are pulling collectively for heat.”