The last few years have been rough for the video game industry, where scarcely a week goes by without news of studio closures or layoffs. With the spectre of these job losses looming over the recent Summer Games Fest via an electronic billboard from New Blood Interactive in downtown LA, Among Us developer Innersloth has announced Outersloth, a fund to support smaller developers and give their projects the opportunity they need to succeed.
“Sharing our success and supporting indie games is incredibly important to us. That’s why we created our indie game fund Outersloth!“, writes Innersloth on the fund’s website. It is stressed that Outersloth does not consider itself a “full service publisher“, nor is it expecting to own the game’s IP. In addition to funding, Innersloth also advises that they can give advice to developers and assist them with finding external partners to assist with development and additional funding. Outersloth’s main goal is to “see fun, original, and clever games get made“.
The fund’s website includes a list of games funded by Outersloth so far. These include Mars First Logistics, ONE BUTN BOSSES, and Battle Suit Aces. With the gaming industry in the state of chaos that it is right now, a fund with no creative strings attached to get promising indie projects off the ground and onto store shelves will be just what many small studios need.
In addition, Innersloth’s presentation at the Summer Games Fest also gave us our first real look at the star-studded upcoming Among Us animated series co-produced by CBS Studios. The animation certainly captures the cartoony, yet minimalist style of the game, complete with the crew being picked off one by one by a mysterious alien threat. It remains to be seen exactly how a mostly plotless multiplayer party game will be translated into an animated TV series, but we will have to wait and see when more information and footage is eventually released.