"Publishers and investors have gotten too focused on the single game," says veteran indie developer Rami Ismail

Indie game veteran Rami Ismail is no stranger to risk in game development. At a time where it's trickier than ever to get support for ambitious projects, and some companies spend hundreds of millions on a game that eventually flops, he believes that even though game publishing and investment carries risk, that there are ways to take more calculated bets with games these days.

"I think one of the topics that keeps coming up over and over is that same thing, is risk," Ismail tells us at Madeira Games Summit. "Like what is the purpose of all of this if we're not making new things? I think it's really easy to forget that in all the numbers and the commerce and all the data and all the marketing and all that, at the heart of it, all the games that are super successful right now are very stubborn games, right? Like we have a super French RPG, we have poker roguelike, we have climbing mountains poorly with your friends, we have all these games that nobody could have market-researched these. They're just bets, right?"

That doesn't mean that publishers and investors should throw money at random games hoping they're the next Peak or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, though. Ismail believes risky bets are how we ended up in the state of the industry we see today. Instead, he thinks there should be a focus on multiple games, rather than publishers throwing all their eggs in a single basket.

"What I think they need to do is they need to understand that no individual game is a good investment, right, for an investor... But if you go and carry it across 10 games and you start spreading that risk, there's a real opportunity in games to make money. And I think publishers and investors have gotten too focused on the single game," he explained.

Ismail says he may be old-fashioned, but he believes in the indie space a publisher should be able to take some of the risk off your hands, whereas today we see developers have to throw their games out into the wild in order to get interest from potential investors.

Check out our full conversation with Ismail below for more details about his upcoming game, Australia Did It: