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Episode Summary

Here is a plan I hear from indie devs all the time: make the game, then find a publisher to handle the funding, the creator outreach and the marketing, all those fun tasks you would rather not do. The problem is that publishers only sign a tiny fraction of the games they see. According to Jay Powell, that is somewhere between 1 and 3 percent. So if that is your plan, the odds say it is probably not going to happen, and when it does not, every one of those tasks lands right back on you.

That is exactly why I wanted to sit down with Jay Powell. He founded the Powell Group back in 2010, a games business consultancy that has worked with studios and publishers like Tripwire, Torn Banners and Nightdive. In 2018 he launched IndieGameBusiness, which has grown into one of the best places for indie devs to learn the real business side of making games, with a Discord of over 11,000 industry folks. Jay has spent nearly three decades in the industry as an agent, a publisher and a consultant, so he has seen the deals that made studios and the mistakes that sank them.

In this conversation, Jay walks through the material from his free Introduction to the Business of Video Games course, then goes well beyond it. We cover who all the gatekeepers are between your game and your players, why launching in November is usually a big no, and when to chase a publisher versus self publish. Then we get into the real math of a publishing deal, the contract terms that still trip devs up, when to bring in a lawyer, and why you need a legal company even if you are making your game alone or with a few friends.

If you have been telling yourself you will figure out the business side once the game is done, friend, this one is for you.

Meet Our Guest: Jay Powell, the Powell Group and Indie Game Business

Jay got into the games industry in the late 1990s as a scout, playing games for an agency and telling them what he thought, before that was even a job title. He spent the first seven or eight years of his career as an agent, doing many of the early publishing contracts for studios like People Can Fly and Paradox. When that agency turned into a publishing company, he stayed for three years, until a very hard lesson in mental health convinced him to walk away. His first startup was a production studio before that was even a term, designing and producing games for IPs like Disney, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and National Geographic. It lasted three years and fell apart when the team tried to make the jump from contract work to original IP.

The Powell Group came out of a simple decision: Jay did not want to move his family to the West Coast. While interviewing with big companies out west, he realized that if a firm could exist purely to consult on free to play mobile monetization, there was room for general games business consulting too. The company started as just Jay and has grown to roughly 20 people. In 2018, frustrated that nobody teaches developers about business, he started streaming on Twitch, which became the Indie Game Business podcast, YouTube channel and Discord. For a guy who jokes that he nearly failed the one econ class he took in college, that is quite the run.

Now Jay and his team are taking it a step further with the Powell Group Business School, a set of affordable courses built from the lectures he gives at universities and industry associations. The Introduction to the Business of Video Games course is completely free, runs over 70 minutes and includes five workshops. They have also launched Blue Ridge Games, a new indie publishing label whose first game is due out soon.

Website: powellgroupconsulting.com

Indie Game Business: indiegamebusiness.com

Free Course: Powell Group Business School

LinkedIn: Jay Powell

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Key Takeaways

“If you want this to be your career and you want to quit that day job and be an indie dev, or you want to keep your studio around for years and years, you need to understand the things that we talk about.”

— Jay Powell, the Powell Group

• Plan for the 97 percent. Publishers sign somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of the games they are sent, which means most indie devs will not land one. Jay is blunt that you need a backup plan, and that almost nobody has prepared devs for it. That plan includes marketing, testing, building relationships with the stores and expanding your distribution. As he points out, Reddit is full of devs who launched without being able to afford any marketing and now cannot figure out why the game is not selling.
• Publishers want proof, not promises. If you do not have a playable demo, a lot of publishers will not even look, because so many other games already do. They also want to see traction, and even 300 wishlists shows you are out there trying. When a frustrated dev on a panel asked what they needed a publisher for if they had to do all that themselves, Jay told him the truth: you do not, unless you lack the time or the experience. His advice is to always look for a publisher unless you have shipped multiple times, and to be ready to self publish either way.
• Everything takes longer than you think. Platform holders and publishers both start with a submission form on their website, and even Jay’s small, nimble publishing team takes three to four weeks to respond. Some publishers in the triple I space take nine months from submission to signed deal. That is why working backwards from your launch date matters so much: map out when you apply for Next Fest, when you contact publishers and when you submit to console platforms, instead of just working forward and hoping it lines up.
• Skip November, launch by mid October or wait for January. The November rush is a holdover from the days of physical retail, when games had to go gold by the end of August to hit shelves before American Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Today it is triple A territory, and content creators and storefronts are all focused on the biggest releases. Jay’s general rule for self published indies is to launch no later than the second week of October or wait until January. There are exceptions, like the indie that launched into a cleared out window next to a big triple A game and did well, but as Jay’s Discord likes to say, it depends.
• The ecosystem is bigger than you and a publisher. Developers, publishers, platform holders, distributors, middleware and outsourcing companies, press, content creators and players all play a part, and if one piece falls apart it affects everything. Spend three months porting to PlayStation and get rejected by Sony, and every projection you made is gone. The relationship devs underestimate most is press and content creators, because they take far longer to build than people expect. And while publishers do not want games that are already released or have been through Next Fest, Jay has never seen a deal fall apart because of an early build on itch.io.
• Do the math before you sign. Jay walks through a simple deal: a $200,000 advance with a 70/30 split on a game that grosses $500,000. Steam takes its 30 percent first, leaving $350,000. The publisher recoups its $200,000, leaving $150,000, and your 70 percent is $105,000. Change the recoupment rate to 200 percent and the publisher takes $400,000 before you see anything, so you are still in the hole. Ask every publisher for a sample royalty statement, watch for cross collateralization across multiple games, and get clear definitions of net receipts and marketing expenses. Jay once saw a publisher recoup the same E3 costs against six different games.
• Bring in an industry lawyer the minute you are asked to sign. Most game industry lawyers Jay knows have indie rates, usually a few hundred dollars and around $1,000 at the top end, and a bad contract can cost you far more than that. It has to be someone who knows games, because they can tell you what looks scary but is actually normal, and they will not redline your contract into something that annoys the publisher. Jay has talked to devs whose last game sold 200,000 or 300,000 units and who never saw a dime because the contract was set up against them.
• Set up your company before you need it. Jay’s team once passed on a game they loved because the developers had no legal entity to sign with. The fully remote team could not decide where to set up their company. Working with friends feels fine until someone has a baby and cannot keep living on indie money, which is why a proper company protects everyone. His first three moves for any new studio: set up a legal company, do real market research on your game idea, and build a production plan so you know how long it will take, how many people you need and what it will cost. And through all of it, look after your mental health. Jay calls it the one habit that separates successful indie devs from struggling ones.

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Show Notes & Mentioned Resources

About Jay, the Powell Group and Indie Game Business

• Powell Group Consulting
• Powell Group Business School, including the free Introduction to the Business of Video Games course
• Indie Game Business: podcast, YouTube, Discord and the free list of 600+ publishers and investors
• Blue Ridge Games: the new indie publishing label from the Indie Game Business team

Games Mentioned

• Shuffles ‘n Scuffles by Sour Circuit Studios
• Balatro by LocalThunk
• Project Zomboid by The Indie Stone
• Subnautica by Unknown Worlds

Play It Forward

Jay’s big shout out went to Shuffles ‘n Scuffles from Sour Circuit Studios, a team he met recently in Canada. It is a roguelike deck builder where you build your own cards, and the game is balanced around it. What impressed Jay most is the story behind it: five students from a university in northern Canada decided their senior project had legs, then bug tested it, localized it, took it through Next Fest and launched it with no official industry experience. Because they know the Balatro developer locally, they even landed a bundle with Balatro. As Jay put it, if you have launched a game, you are already ahead of about 80 percent of developers out there.

He also gave some love to the team behind Project Zomboid, who have been at it for years and years.

Events, Organizations and Platforms Mentioned

• GCX (Gaming Community Expo): the Orlando event Jay highlights for bringing developers, publishers and content creators together
• Safe In Our World: the UK mental health charity for the games industry
• itch.io: a great home for an early build and player feedback
• Jestr and FirstLook, two newer options for getting your game in front of short form creators

Related Freaking Cool Indies Episodes

• How Game Devs Win With Shorts in 2026: the Jestr CEO on the shift to short form creators
• From Idea to Trademark: Protecting Your Indie Game the Right Way: the legal side of what you actually own
• Dan Long on burnout: don’t let you ambition take everything away from out
• The Complete Guide to Pitching Your Indie Game to Publishers: what to do once you are ready to pitch
• Game Funding Explained: Which One is Right for You?: publisher money versus every other way to fund your game

Key Frameworks from This Episode

• Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best. Pitch publishers if you want one, but build your plan as if you will self publish, because the odds say you probably will.
• Work Backwards from Launch. Start at your launch date and map every milestone in reverse: Next Fest, publisher outreach, platform submissions, press and creator outreach.
• October or January. As a self published indie, aim to launch no later than the second week of October, or wait until the new year.
• Ask for the Royalty Statement. Before you sign, ask the publisher to show you a sample royalty statement based on your deal so you can see where every dollar goes.
• Company, Research, Production Plan. Set up a legal entity, confirm there is room in the market for your idea, then build a production plan so you know your timeline, team size and budget.

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