By Patrick Garratt

Game development facing a litany of existential crises is hardly a newsflash. The career structure of triple-A in the west continues to unravel along with the rest of the technology-based creative industries, and the apparent safe haven of double-A is now sagging under the weight of AI-assisted production and a dearth of funding. For some, the game business has failed, and in an industry stuffed with me-too, opportunity may well rely on progression, a new approach. It's time, thinks new studio Raze And Rebuild, for developers to be the change they want to see in the world. 

Having been made redundant last year from their position at Monolith as a senior writer, Tanya DePass has linked up with a core group of four to create a developer focused on inclusion and accountability. They've founded Raze And Rebuild with Tarja Porkka-Kontturi, Laura Kate Dale and Ian Schreiber, an entirely remote team supported by expert advisers and contributors such as Ellie Tsang (also an ex-Monolith writer) and Tramell Ray Isaac, the Fallout artist responsible for designing Vault Boy. Raze And Rebuild has no vertical authority structure, the intention to only create games accessible to as many players as possible, and a zero-tolerance policy on accepting funding from those offering "blood money". 

Thus, Raze And Rebuild is built on the question of who gets to decide, who gets to play, and who gets to pay. It currently has no significant funding and no announced game. As we discover by talking to DePass, Dale and Tsang, though, the studio's output could mark the beginning of a new route to survival in game development's current chaos. 

No rank to pull 

As Raze And Rebuild moves through the greenlighting stage while searching for funds, the subject of authority has been dealt with swiftly. No one in the studio's power structure has the right to overrule anyone, decisions being taken rather by vote. Having been burned by studio hierarchy, the idea of "bosses" wasn't attractive.

"It was just a reminder that we're not people to the C-suite," DePass tells Knowledge, speaking of the end of her two-year position at Monolith, where she worked on the studio's cancelled Wonder Woman game. 

"We're numbers on a spreadsheet. And that's why I've been adamant that this is a co-op. Everyone's voice gets heard."

DePass's comments mirror those made recently by Critical Reflex founder Rita Lebedeva – that all involved in the company must be taken seriously. Raze And Rebuild subverts conventional studio structures, however, in that there is no "head" to speak of. It's not hard to see why, given DePass has "always been pro-union," and their experience at Monolith only radicalised them further, making them "very active" with US game unions such as the CWA. 

"It really burns my ass to see people who destroy lives and destroy businesses continue to be rich and prosper where you have people literally scrambling to keep the lights on, pay their bills, feed their kids," they say. 

While a flat decision structure has been non-negotiable, its implementation has been complicated, largely due to a lack of reference in the game industry. 

"We've done a good job of setting that horizontal structure in place early, in that no one could have pulled rank," says Dale. "Like, when we have a big decision of, 'Do we want to whittle our shortlist of games down, or do we want to settle on that first game?', everyone has the same vote.

She adds: "We've had lengthy governance conversations around how to settle deadlocks, and how to get around those edge cases, which were not easy. A lot of our first calls as a group were trying to hash out those kinds of structural questions, just because those things are really hard to do when you're trying to break away from a hierarchical structure."

Good games for all

Anarchistic decision pipelines aren't the only inclusion concepts shaping Raze And Rebuild's formation and output: accessibility is also key.

Options such as being able to increase the size of text, or limit nausea-inducing headbobbing in first-person, or even switching away from first-person perspectives completely, aren't always considered in terms of player disability. For Raze And Rebuild, however, accessibility is foundational to its games, and a lack of it could stop a project from ever progressing. The team, says accessibility expert Dale, has been built to be "able to consider from day one: 'Is this project something that could be built in an accessible way? And if not, could we make changes to make that possible? Or is that a reason to not pursue this project?'" 

She adds: "Far too often, accessibility as a discipline in game development is thought about as: 'Once the game is up to a playable state, we'll bring people in for a couple of hours to give feedback on what's inaccessible.' 

"There are few things more frustrating than being excited about a game and then realising upon release, 'Oh, I can't play it because I was simply not considered as someone whose needs were important enough to account for during development.'"

Part of the opposition to including these types of options comes from developers concerned that they'll damage their game aesthetically. For Raze And Rebuild, the mission is clear. 

"We aren't just pursuing the market," says Tsang. "We're also kicking the door open [...] to people who haven't had the opportunity to play good games, or as many good games, rather." 

Money trouble: who pays? 

While the studio is set on inclusion and a refusal of authority, there is no escaping the fact that nothing happens without money. Funding for games is difficult to find, but Raze And Rebuild is well aware that surviving on little in the early days is essential while seeking ethical investment of exactly the right type. The studio has now launched Ko-fi and Paypal pages. 

"We're very invested in pursuing sources of non-dilutive funding and maintaining creative control of the projects we work on," says Tsang. "There's an aspect of principle behind it. But also, we are bootstrapping. That's kind of the nature of where we are in the industry right now." 

As Dale notes, most of those laid off in the ongoing purges in the US and Europe are running on fumes. Fortunately, Raze And Rebuild's tank is not entirely empty. 

"We've had small amounts of support that have come in with no strings attached that have helped us get off the ground with some of the basic costs involved in getting a business up and running," she says. 

The team has looked at funding sources of a more traditional nature, but the studio insists on strict conditions. "The thing I think we're all in alignment on is no blood money," says DePass, "no money that's coming from sources that are participating in genocide, and no one who's all in on generative AI." 

While Raze And Rebuild is yet to announce a game, it seems talks among the team are advanced. Whatever arises from these first projects will not be the "same cookie-cutter games that do print money every year because people won't take a chance on something new," says DePass. As to whether or not a publisher is going to be won over by inclusive, accessible games funded by only ethical sources, it may take bravery on the commercial side to back something different compared to the flood of indeti-projects now swamping Steam, but DePass, having spent years on the far left frontline, knows that anything is possible with enough unified will. 

"I like a challenge," they say. "I run on spite and caffeine."