This week, we talk to two independent developers that have kept themselves busy in recent years – albeit with very different approaches. 

On the one hand, Evil Empire tells us about its journey from three staff publishing Dead Cells to a team of 60 working on the next Castlevania, taking over the development of Brotato, and championing other indie devs with its Triple-I initiative. So how did the Bordeaux-based studio get entrusted with one of Konami's biggest franchises? COO Benjamin Laulan tells us more. 

On the other hand, Inkle chats about the success of TR-49, released earlier this year as part of a hectic round of activity. Co-founder Jon Ingold tells us about what made the difference, from pricing to attempting to tame the algorithm.

When Evil Empire spun off from Dead Cells developer Motion Twin circa 2019, no one could have predicted this would lead it to making the next Castlevania. Its original expertise was publishing, and yet the Bordeaux-based developer boldly made its way to become the studio Konami chose to make the first entry in the original series since 2008's Order Of Ecclesia.  

What started as "three guys working on the ninja publishing of Dead Cells" – as COO Benjamin Laulan puts it – is now a studio employing 60 people. 

Evil Empire has been handling all live ops for Dead Cells since 2019, building its credibility and reputation along the way, then making The Rogue Price Of Persia for Ubisoft. It recently announced that it was picking up the reins for Brotato and, of course, creating Castlevania: Belmont's Curse. 

"It was hard because we tripled in size in one year," Laulan tells Knowledge. "We went from 15 to 45. We had Prince Of Persia, we had Dead Cells, and we had the Castlevania game that was also starting at the same time. A lot of projects that we couldn't say 'no' to. It was a tough one, but we did manage to get over it." 

Laulan initially met with Konami at BitSummit when he was looking for a publisher for Dead Cells' physical release in Japan. He thought he'd also mention Evil Empire's desire to create an Alucard skin or a rapier weapon for Dead Cells, as an homage to its roots. "I remember saying to myself: 'It's too big. They will never say yes'," he recalls. But Konami was immediately enthused about the idea.  

Evil Empire ran with it, made mock-ups of iconic levels from Castlevania adapted with Dead Cells' art direction, and Laulan went back to Konami pitching a full-on Castlevania DLC. That proposal ended up being 2023's Return To Castlevania.  

"They said, 'Let's do it, and would you also be interested in doing the next Castlevania game?'" Laulan laughs, adding he still can't believe it's happened and that he's now able to talk about it, without any info leaking prior to the announcement in February at Sony's State Of Play. "I'm stoked. Sometimes you've just got to ask the question, and you can be surprised by the answer."

Returning to Castlevania 

Working on such an iconic franchise can be treacherous, in particular working out the balance between injecting your own identity as a studio and making sure it feels familiar to returning players. 

"We proved our love for the franchise through Return To Castlevania, because there was so much fan service," Laulan says. "For Return To Castlevania, [Konami] basically gave us carte blanche. We put every character we wanted, we were able to use all the songs. Even if discussions [about Belmont's Curse] started at the same time, [the DLC] was the rite of passage, to move on with the full game. 

"It's great because Konami really wants to stay true to the genre, and what made Castlevania such an iconic franchise, and yet is super open to our modern takes. We put a lot of emphasis on the game feel, the fastest action, the moment-to-moment combat system – it's something really important for us. We experienced it with Dead Cells, The Rogue Prince Of Persia, and now Castlevania. It's great to be working on such an iconic franchise, and being able to modernise it while still remaining very truthful to its origin, and not trying to reinvent the wheel or make something completely different. We want to be really respectful of the original experience." 

Replicating the Dead Cells model  

In addition to Castlevania, Evil Empire has recently taken over live ops for Brotato, Blobfish's 2023 shoot-'em-up that sold over ten million copies. 

"Personally, it's been years since I've wanted to reproduce the Dead Cells model with another game," Laulan confesses. "We had this idea that if we could do it with Motion Twin and Dead Cells, we could do it with other games. Sometimes, when you make a hit, it's hard to go back to the drawing board. This is where I thought we could come in and say, 'The game is still played by thousands of players, and you want to give them more – we could be that partner'." 

Laulan says that he's not trying to build this extensive business model around the idea, but that it makes sense for games that have potential and that the team cares about. There's certainly more on the horizon, he adds.

Three million cumulated wishlists 

Laulan tells us the idea of working on Brotato first came up during a chat he had at Gamescom with its original dev, Thomas Gervraud, off the back of Evil Empire's first Triple-I showcase. "It's one of the many good things that came out of this," he smiles. The Triple-I Initiative is another project that the studio has been hard at work on for the past three years. The concept is simple: a digital showcase for the cream of the crop from the indie sphere. No ads, no hosts. Just trailers. 

The third edition took place last month, and performed twice as well as the previous year, Laulan says: the games featured gathered three million cumulated wishlists in a week.  

"That's a 60,000 wishlist median increase per game," Laulan adds, saying wishlists really are the main focus of Triple-I, as a way to help an indie industry in dire need of better visibility. "We are making sure that we're putting the right games in front of the right people rather than [seek] big viewing numbers. It's not that we don't care about how many people are watching the show, it's more that we care that all the people that are watching the show are interested in the type of games that we are going to show them. This way, we can transform very well." 

Sustainable and independent 

As our discussion comes to an end, we reminisce about the last time we chatted to Laulan, back in 2023. Evil Empire almost feels like a different studio now. At the time, it was all about stepping out of Motion Twin's shadow. While still collaborating very closely with its sister studio, Evil Empire has now resolutely come into its own. But one question mark remains, which returns to a theme Laulan was keen to discuss three years ago: what about the studio creating its own IP? He immediately lights up when we raise the topic.  

"You know, Dead Cells helped us to be sustainable and, especially for a young studio, it's very important to make sure you're building on strong foundations. That's what gave us the opportunity to work on the Price Of Persia and Castlevania IP, so we're building our house very cautiously. It gave us this safety net.  

"But we do know that creating your own IP is also what makes you able to be fully independent. We actually started prototyping a few things and I think our next cycle of production – or the next one – will probably be our own IP. We just want to make sure we build it in the best way, without taking too much risk; maybe with a smaller production to start with. It's the next step for Evil Empire to really be sustainable as a studio."

When we previously spoke to Jon Ingold, for one of the very first editions of Knowledge in March 2025, the conversation was hot on the heels of Expelled, then the latest release from Inkle, the studio he co-founded with Joseph Humfrey. In the year-and-change since that conversation, he's been a busy man.

In the intervening time, Inkle has published The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, a collection of over 100 essays from videogame writers edited by Ingold, and launched an accompanying podcast. It will soon be followed by Ingold's fourth and final Heaven's Vault novel, continuing the story of its 2019 adventure game. Oh, and in this period the studio has also made and released an entire new game, which happens to be one of the 2026's finest to date.

TR-49, a deductive game about AI and literature wrapped up in a Bletchley Park-era computer interface, received a rare 9 in Edge on its release in January. It's one of just three 2026 games to achieve this score, alongside Resident Evil: Requiem and Marathon, productions with – to put it mildly – much more substantial resources behind them.  

Finding success on Steam  

TR-49 was created by a core team of three (Ingold, Humfrey and artist Anastasia Wyatt), with contractors helping out, over a span of nine months, and even that was a case of scope-creep, Ingold tells us. When he worked up a quick prototype in the week before Expelled's release, "it was originally intended as a one-month 'learn Godot' project," he says. "But we kept adding new bits of polish." 

Whatever motivated Inkle to keep going with the project, it certainly seems to have been the right decision. "TR-49 came out and did better than anything we've ever done," Ingold says. (Specifically on Steam, that is – the game is also available on Switch and iOS, where it's performed "OK," he says. "Nothing sensational.")

While he declines to share exact numbers, Ingold explains that TR-49's sales on Steam have followed the usual pattern: an initial spike that ebbs away to a "background trickle," before spiking again when it's discounted – as it is right now, in fact, as part of Steam's InterfaceX26 sale of 'fake OS' games. The difference is simply one of scale. "That background trickle is about ten to 15 times higher than usual, and the launch spike lasted about five weeks instead of one." 

This uptick is well deserved, of course, for such a great game. But, as Ingold himself says, "all our games are good!" So what made the difference here?

First, there is the matter of price. TR-49 costs $6.99 on Steam, a considerable step down from the $14.99 price tag for Expelled and its predecessor, Overboard. "Our thinking was that we wanted to hit the 'less than $7' box on Steam's front page," Ingold explains, "and we wanted a price we could use across platforms, so mobile is the same as Steam."

Ingold likes the "immediacy" of this price point, in a market where "people are always looking for a reason to not play a game." The idea, he says, was to make it feel like more effort to wishlist the game and wait for a discount than to just buy it then and there – a strategy that seems to have worked well for the likes of Peak. 

Of course, when your game isn't selling in the kind of volumes as Landfall's hit, there are downsides to this approach. "It hasn't made us an enormous amount of money," Ingold admits. Does he have any regrets about the price in retrospect? "It was perhaps a little lower than we should have gone, but that's an entirely untested statement – I expect the price is part of the package people bought into." 

Algorithm agony  

More than anything, though, TR-49's success on Steam simply comes down to the whims of the algorithm that decides which games to surface on each user's version of the storefront. "We've never seen the algorithm treat us with respect before," Ingold says. "Normally, it kind of buries us after a couple of weeks."

Expelled was a particular victim of this, it seems. "A bug on [Steam's] side cancelled its launch-exposure window," he says. "That's the thing that 'tries' the game out on customers, and establishes its rank in the algorithm." As a result, the game "disappeared from Steam's front page about five seconds after launch." By the time Inkle had discovered the bug, a few weeks later, and was granted a second "visibility round" by Steam, it was too late. "Without the property of 'newness', the algorithm isn't interested," Ingold says. "You can't get back into New & Trending without some major community support from somewhere."

There may have been other factors at work too, he acknowledges: "It's perfectly possible Expelled was also too expensive, not something people wanted to play, released at the wrong time, came out when people were busy with Blue Prince, confusing, badly paced, too British… but who the hell knows? There's no way to unpick the aspects of a launch." 

Lessons learned 

Nevertheless, Inkle attempted to learn what it could from the situation, leading the studio to two conclusions. "Firstly, we have to make games we want to make, rather than chasing trends," Ingold explains, "because the results of a launch are so far outside of our control it's pointless to work on something we aren't delighted to have made. Secondly, we should aim to make more and risk less, so we can keep making things."

This is similar to the conclusion Inkle reached with Overboard, a game made in around three months that became, at the time, the studio's fastest-selling PC game. "TR-49 was definitely a re-run of the Overboard model," Ingold says. "Let's take this idea that we're excited about and get it made and out into the market as quickly as we can, while it still feels 'hot' – but without compromising it."

Back in 2022, for an Edge article examining the making of Overboard, we asked Ingold whether this development model would become the norm for Inkle. He demurred then, pointing out that it could easily become a trap for the studio. Four years later, he's similarly unwilling to commit.

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Highlights from industry chat channels

Issue 423 of Edge is out now, showcasing Frictional Games' chillingly experimental Ontos. Step one: Read some excerpts below. Step two: Buy the magazine in a newsagent or online here. Optional third step: Start a subscription by getting your first three issues for £/$5. 

"From a general design standpoint, the game is not really about trying to survive. It's not really, 'How do I avoid dying?' It's more about other people dying because of your actions."
Creative director Thomas Grip on one of the many ways Ontos upends expectations.

"As strong as engines like Unreal and Unity are, it's also not easy to create a complicated RPG with them, out of the box, without having to deeply modify the engines in question in the first place."
Technical director Bert van Semmertier tells us why Larian is part of a band of studios sticking with custom game engines.

"You can't really succeed on Kickstarter very much any more – at least in the game space, in my opinion – with a hope and a dream and a good idea. You have to have already done a shitload of work. That's the kind of philosophy you want to have in early access now."
Tyler Sigman, co-founder of Red Hook Studios, on the evolution of early-access game production.

"With this group of people, I barely have any meetings. I think we've had, like, three meetings total. Ever. Just to align ourselves on different things."
Designer Kenny Sun explains the unorthodox team-management approach behind Ball X Pit.

"Whatever you see to be the attitude of the game or not, if you feel really icky and wrong, if you feel really negative emotions from doing these actions, then that’s a unique thing games can do."
The University Of Salford's Dr Anthony Smith joins us to pick through the tangle that is game censorship.

"Remember when you were a kid and you could turn any walk into a game, just by deciding to hop every third pavement stone, or pretending you could explode pigeons in the street by thinking hard enough at them?"
Alex Spencer takes the world of game design onto the streets.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.