The developers of Dead Cells, Darkest Dungeon and Slay The Spire are launching their own "triple-I" Game Awards

28.03.2024 - 17:15 / rockpapershotgun.com / Red Hook Studios

A regular rogue's gallery of independent game developers - including the creators of Dead Cells, Slay The Spire, Darkest Dungeon, Spiritfarer, Terraria and V Rising - have clubbed together to run their own videogame showcase: the Triple-I Initiative. Initially screening on 10th April, it'll be a 45-minute, unhosted, back-to-back series of trailers, reveals and surprise game or demo releases, designed (as per the press release) "to highlight fan-favorite games and hype up established indie classics as well as new IPs". It could become a yearly thing, but that'll obviously depend on how well the first showcase goes down.

According to a few of the organisers, the IIIIs - as they shall now and forever be known - reflect a high level of anxiety even among more established indie teams about finding an audience, together with a feeling that they aren't being served by existing showcases like the Geoffies, with their blockbuster headliners, celebrity cameos and extended Kojima soliloquies.

The inaugural showcase won't make anybody any money directly. There will be no sponsors or advertising, and all the participants are chipping in to meet the cost of production. The idea began life at Evil Empire, the current developers of Dead Cells, who have spent much of the past year or so convincing other studios to join.

"We came up with this idea when we had to announce our own game, and couldn't find a fitting place to announce it in the showcase landscape," Evil Empire co-founder Benjamin Laulan told me during a quick chat with several of the participating devs at GDC last week. "Because on one side there are the big showcases such as the Game Awards, which are more for triple-A games and games with really huge budgets. And on the other hand, there are showcases that may be more focused on [smaller] indies. And we couldn't really identify ourselves as a studio, I mean, between those two. We felt that there was this in-between spot that needed to be filled somehow."

"We literally for years have been building our entire plan of how to announce games around the big tentpole showcases," added Rodrigue Duperron, marketing and publishing director for Thunder Lotus Games. "It's part and parcel of being companies of our size - that fear that you're gonna announce something and it just sort of floats away into the ether, or gets stomped by one of the bigger announcements hours or days later, and no one remembers. So there was just something so obvious about what our friends here tried to put together - it's a need that exists."

A sceptical soul might look at the currently confirmed IIII participants and object that most of them are plenty famous enough, with pretty strong player followings - certainly, I don't see