This article was originally published on 31 July, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Go-Go Town!, Prideful Sloth's just-released cosy city-builder, has worked. Developed in a climate of brutal discoverability issues for indies and arriving after two years of PC Early Access, the self-published Go Go Town! hit over 2,300 concurrent players on Steam during its July 17 launch weekend, and briefly swept the regional Switch 2 digital charts, getting to second place in the US and number one in the UK and Japan. 

Not bad for a company with five employees. 

The Australian developer has shipped three commercially successful titles – Yonder (2017), Grow: Song Of The Evertree (2021) and now Go-Go Town! – without ever growing much beyond half-a-dozen people. 

The Brisbane studio briefly scaled up for Grow, reaching nine in-house staff and around 14 full-time equivalents once contractors were added. It didn't stick. 

"We just looked at the numbers and the team size and we found we were spending more time managing and less time working," co-founder Cheryl Vance tells Knowledge. 

"We set up the company because we liked making games. We made a conscious decision to pull back some of those roles, which is always an unfortunate thing." 

The studio settled at five, a size Vance describes as suiting "the type of management style that we have as directors" and one that keeps "the dinosaur studio", whose youngest member is 41, as nimble as possible: "That team size and dynamic is nice because it makes the team more reactive to things," she says. "The bigger a team gets, the less reactive you can be." 

Self-published by choice, not necessity 

The studio's setup has been a happy accident of sorts, the current industry climate favouring smaller teams with lower costs. The reactivity the "dinosaurs" gained from staying small has bled into publishing and marketing. 

Go-Go Town! is self-published, following a publisher's exit from the market partway through development. The studio worked with 505 Games on Grow, its second title, but not this time. 

"Generally speaking, we prefer to be self-published," Vance says. The issue, for her, is less about publishers doing a bad job than about pricing consistently intangible work: "When you sign a contract with publishers, they want to know what you're delivering. It's very concrete. And they have this nebulous thing that they're doing, and you can't ever ask what the value of that nebulous marketing thing is." 

She's careful not to generalise: "I can't say they're all bad. There are definitely good deals and good people and good relationships out there," but "a lot of the people getting into those deals, it's because they need the money."

Prideful Sloth is in the enviable position of being financially stable after previous successes. That independence allowed for two years of Early Access development for Go Go Town!, which Vance says the studio would repeat without hesitation. The game entered a private playtest around 15 months into development, moved into full Early Access once the team had "a solid MVP", and used the two years that followed to rebuild core systems, such as tutorials and the tech tree, based on recurring feedback. 

The changes were substantial enough that the eventual 1.0 release broke compatibility with existing saves. 

"It was kind of like, 'We can support your saves, or you can get three months' less development on the game,'" she laughs. "We figured people want three more months of development on the game." 

Review scores have climbed since launch, which Vance takes as vindication of the Early Access process. That experience underpins the advice she gives most readily to smaller teams entering the cosy genre (or, as she's keen to point out, any genre): don't commit to a direction before it's been tested. 

"You need to do your market research… Get to a point where you can vet and sanity check as soon as possible if it's a viable project," she says. "Test your audience early and find out: is it a good game? Will people start latching onto it?" 

Different KPIs, not smaller versions of the same ones 

Directing Go Go Town!'s development in this way is the result of a ruggedly independent outlook formed since Prideful Sloth was formed 11 years ago. Vance, who worked in triple-A companies such as Activision Blizzard and Ninja Theory before founding the studio with Joel Styles and John Northwood, is now part of a tiny, massively experienced team maturing into a bona fide self-publishing success. 

"As employees, it was great to make those big games, but you still just got a salary and somebody else got the good dollars," she says. Prideful Sloth is not chasing Palworld-scale numbers, but has, in her words, "done OK enough" to raise staff salaries on this project. Control over the studio and its products is the compensation: discretion over spend, including on physical events, which she treats skeptically: "Physical events don't return, we know this – but it's an opportunity space, and you have to be OK with spending money for an opportunity that may never eventuate." 

Prideful Sloth has a year-long post-launch roadmap for Go-Go Town!, covering fixes and further content, which will bring total development time to five years. Beyond that, Vance says the studio has no shortage of ideas for its next mainline title, but wants a shorter "palate cleanser" project first. Its shape, she says, is still undecided.

This article was originally published on 31 July, 2026 - read the full issue