1 Year of Outersloth 🦥

Hi everyone!

It’s officially been one year since we publicly announced our game fund Outersloth, so we thought it’d be nice to reflect on what’s happened since then, where we’re at now, and give insight on the projects we’ve signed. Will this be helpful for applications? Probably not, but it’ll be fun!

Submission Data

As of writing this post, Outersloth has a signing rate of roughly 1.4%. For reference, according to Jason Della Rocca’s talk about funding, the sign percentage for publishers tends to be 0.16%.

Of course, because Outersloth aims to be hands off and only promises development funds (and not marketing, localization, etc.), we’re able to take on more projects and likely get less submissions. That, and because we don’t depend on it to pay our salaries (thanks Among Us), we can be less rigid about what we sign.

Signed Games Data

While we’ve further streamlined our process for submissions (big thanks to Kristi Anderson and Mike Barrett for handling a lot of work for us), the way we choose games continues to be largely “vibes”. (For more, see Forest’s post about how he signs games.) Between our tastes and our funding partners, we have pretty varied styles, mechanics, and themes we enjoy.

• Total games funded: 22
  • 23 soon hopefully, one is currently in the slowness of lawyer reviews zzz….
• Games released: 4
• Veryyyy broad genres signed:
  • Arcade-style: 4
  • Clicker/Idle: 2
  • Construction/City-Builder: 2
  • Card: 2
  • Narrative: 2
  • Platformer: 2
  • Roguelite: 2
  • RPG: 6

More specifically, here are some fun updates on currently signed games from the start of 2025:

• In just 5 days of revealing, Neverway hit over 100k wishlists on Steam
• The Horror at Highrook released on May 1, 2025 to Very Positive reviews
• Battle Suit Aces released their first demo during LudoNarraCon
• Berserk B.I.T.S released their demo
• Rogue Eclipse released their demo
• We revealed more games being funded: Desktop Explorer, Gunny Ascend, Rune Fencer Illyia, and Game is Full of Bugs
• Mars First Logistics (the first game ever funded by Outersloth!) will be coming out of Early Access on September 26 2025

For a list of all the Outersloth games that are publicly revealed, check out our website.

Team Data

We thought it’d be fun to see where the teams we’ve signed are based. This is just where they’re “officially” located, but many teams have remote workers all over.

• North America: 10
• Central America: 1
• Europe: 7
• East Asia: 1
• Southeast Asia: 1
• Oceania: 1
• South Africa: 1

Due to how hands off Outersloth is, it tends to lean towards funding slightly more experienced developers. However, we also believe in giving new developers a shot, especially when their game is a blast to play or just has a lot of heart and soul in it. There’s much to be said about getting the experience of shipping your first commerical game, and we hope our help makes that process slightly easier. So of our 22 teams, these are the rough experience levels:

• Studios who have never shipped a commercial project: 7
• Studios who have shipped 1 commercial project: 9
• Studios who have shipped 2+ commercial projects: 6

Funding Data

At inception, Outersloth had a set budget every year for the next 5 (now 3) years, so we try to stay within a certain signing amount every quarter. This ensures we don’t blow it all at once and games that submit in 2028 aren’t straight out of luck. Being able to split costs with Casey and [MYSTERY PARTNER] comes in clutch for helping us sign way more than we could normally! Thanks besties.

• Game budgets signed (<$500,000): 13
• Game budgets signed ($500k – $999k): 3
• Game budgets signed ($1m+): 6

Speaking of which… we likely aren’t funding anymore games that are above $1 million for the rest of the year, sorryyyyy. I know we still haven’t announced our terms yet, and we will once more games are released, I promise.

As far as how many games have been signed by each, the split is along these lines – the totals are greater than the number of signed games because we often split funding.

• Games signed by Outersloth: 20
• Games signed by Casey Yano: 9
• Games signed by [MYSTERY PARTNER]: 7
• Games signed by all 3 partners: 7

Conclusion

So yeah! That’s the tea.

Kk bye.

…

Fine I won’t just end with that. But we’re quite happy with the way Outersloth has gone, and we hope to release more data about the games as they release. And eventually go public about our terms.

Outersloth is already an immense success to us. The main goal was to get money into the hands of indie developers to help good games get made, and we’ve done that. Hopefully we make enough money from this so we can sustain our efforts, but we’ll just have to see how it goes once more of our games release!

Much love to the studios that have signed with us. It can be so scary to go on a self-publishing route, and hopefully it’s been worth it. I guess you can always tell us if it isn’t in the Slack. Plus shout out to Sam D’Elia for providing the teams with biz dev advice, and our partners at IndieBI for helping the games with anything analytics and sales related.

Incredible thanks to Casey Yano and [MYSTERY FRIEND] for helping to make this go even further. You probably are not reading this and will never read this. Respect. I’ll yell at you in DMs later.

AND THANKS FOREST AND MARCUS FOR INVENTING OUTERSLOTH AND INNERSLOTH AND AMONG US THIS IS MY BLOG POST SO I CAN WRITE THAT AND NOT LOOK CRINGE CONGRATULATING OURSELVES.

Okay.

BYEEE.

Victoria & Forest (but mostly Victoria, thank you for writing this) _{(Victoria edit: wait when did you write this Forest lol)}

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