This article was originally published on November 21, 2025 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

As the videogame industry searches obsessively for "efficiencies", the question of long-term sustainability, both in creative and financial terms, has risen to the top of strategic priorities.

Sustainability is consistently being framed in operational processes: tools that accelerate production, headcount reductions, and, most recently, an increasingly less-guarded enthusiasm for generative AI.

But Gareth Damian Martin, creator of Citizen Sleeper and its sequel, argues that the real foundation of sustainable creative work lies elsewhere.

"I think of myself as more of an artist who works independently with contractors who support me," they say, speaking this week before appearing as a panellist in the first Knowledge Live event in London, which focused on how game companies can adapt and thrive in the current business climate. This structure has allowed them to protect both their work and their practice.

Martin's model is built on resisting volatility rather than reacting to it. They self-fund their projects, tightly scope their games, and approach development as a long-form artistic process that grows from project to project.

Sustainability, in their view, comes from cultivating practice rather than pursuing scale.

Sustainability through practice, not prediction

A recurring theme in Martin's reflections is that sustainability cannot be imposed from the outside, but must be developed internally.

"I've almost intentionally insulated myself," they say. "I came from outside games and saw companies get big, get to the point where they had so many staff members and such a high burn rate that they could only take the least adventurous projects."

Their response was to structure their own work so that creative autonomy was non-negotiable. Martin believes developers should design projects, not merely products, if they're to achieve long-term stability. "What's your project design?" they ask. "What do you want that project to achieve? Do you want to learn new skills? Build a team? Make money to pay for a future project? Establish your name?"

This approach shifts how Martin interprets market pressure. Rather than designing to trends, they begin with the experience they want to create and then ask: "What's my invitation to people? Why would they even bother to download this thing?"

Why gen-AI can't produce sustainable creativity

Martin's scepticism toward generative AI is rooted in their understanding of how artistic practice is formed. They argue that generative systems interrupt the feedback loop on which creative craft depends.

"One of the things that strikes me about AI is it often feels like generative work is about people not being good enough at things or not having time," they say. "Every bit of software I use, I taught myself. I understood those tools as things that would allow me to do something better… but AI is saying: 'Don't bother – here's the solution'."

This, they argue, prevents the development of a sustainable creative identity.

"You won't develop a practice if you use AI to generate imagery or text," Martin says. "If you do develop a practice, you'll develop one that's incredibly reliant on an external factor that will ultimately be enshittified and monetised. You're not going to get it for free. You'll pay for it somehow."

This concept, they say, that creative "talent" is built over constant practice and iteration, is relevant from the smallest to the largest videogame projects, right up to triple-A. They reject the idea that AI solves the industry's central technical problem, that seeking more cost-effective ways to increase fidelity no longer moves players, but simply inflates budgets.

"If the solution to that is that we automate the process," Martin warns, "I think that's going to be disastrous… It's very clearly the human element of games that works with people."

Martin's own success illustrates this point. Citizen Sleeper was nominated alongside Elden Ring for best RPG at the DICE Awards in February 2023, an outcome they cite as proof that players respond to human intention, not expenditure: "If anything could tell you it doesn't matter about scale and fidelity, then it's that."

Art and commerce: A false division

While Martin works from an artistic mindset, they reject the commonly accepted binary between creative ambition and commercial viability.

"I don't create this division in my mind between a product and an artwork," they explain. "Games are beautiful because they are total artworks: the UI, the key art, the Steam description – those are all parts of the thing itself."

This holistic view informs how they approach distribution platforms. Game Pass, for example, affects their income significantly: "What Microsoft wants to sign affects me," they say. But they do not see this necessity to conform to the publishing environment as a detriment. "I like that outward-facing attitude," they continue. "It's part of conceptualising the game."

Steam, meanwhile, is described in pragmatic but artistic terms. Visibility matters, but not as an algorithmic issue. "If you're put on the front page of Steam, you sell a larger amount of games… It's not so much playing an algorithm as it is just the organisation," Martin says. The aim is to shape work that resonates quickly: "An indie game has to make someone want to see more within five or eight seconds."

For Martin, this is not a commercial compromise but part of the expressive medium. Games, they argue, should "account for the player".

A humanistic model for a volatile industry

As studios close, teams are laid off and gen-AI is positioned as a cost-cutting imperative, Martin's model offers a profoundly different vision for sustainability. It is a vision grounded in slow growth, stable structures, clear intention, and an insistence on the irreplaceable value of human craft.

"Every time you close a studio, you're closing off a practice," Martin says, speaking of a trajectory of knowledge and skill that will never be rebuilt in exactly the same way. Their own response is to create the opposite environment: one in which practice is protected, refined and allowed to deepen over time.

This is not nostalgia, but a proposal for a different kind of future, one where sustainability is achieved through practice, clarity and humanity rather than generative automation. In Martin's work, sustainability begins with the simple conviction that videogames must remain human-made if they are to continue to matter.

This article was originally published on November 21, 2025 - read the full issue