Posted by squinky on Apr 10, 2025
Last month, Jess and I went to San Francisco for the 2025 Game Developers Conference and gave a talk at the Independent Games Summit, along with Comradery's own Ty Underwood, titled Funding a Sustainable Cooperative Indie Studio in the Apocalypse. For the first 15 minutes, Jess and I spoke about how we, as Soft Chaos, work towards sustainability, and what exactly that means for us. This was followed by another 15 minutes of Ty speculating towards possible futures for worker co-ops in the game industry, and the role they would ideally play in the broader labour movement in games.
We were really happy that our session was well-attended (in spite of being on Monday afternoon) and also very well-received, with audience members hanging out in the wrap-up area with us for a good hour or so after we'd finished speaking, asking us questions and telling us about co-op projects they were involved with. We're hoping that video footage of our talk will be available soon for those who missed it (update: here it is!) but in the meantime, below is the full text of Soft Chaos's portion of the talk, and our slides are here.
Origin Story (and Caveats)
Soft Chaos Cooperative was founded in 2021 by three queer game makers who had been working together for over half a decade. Both together and separately, we have made an eclectic variety of experimental videogames, tabletop games, larps, art installations, and interactive theatre performances. Of course, we realize that to even be able to form a studio, we had a lot of privileges and opportunities. Namely:
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we all have graduate degrees related to games
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we could all afford to do some "sweat equity"
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our team has industry experience at larger studios
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we live in Canada, which has arts funding (and socialized health care)
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we have always had mentors who pulled for us
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our prior projects have festival & academic acclaim
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we had access to business & game making incubators
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we are exceptionally well-networked in our fields
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we have a close, resilient, longstanding friendship
Basically... they call us a unicorn of an outfit for a reason. And one thing we definitely want to stress is: your mileage may vary!
Intro to Co-ops
What exactly is a worker cooperative and why do we like it? In a worker co-op, ownership of the company is shared by its members. That means everyone benefits from the cooperative's successes and shares in its challenges. Business decisions are not made unilaterally, but with input from all workers. This doesn't necessarily mean there's a flat hierarchical structure for every decision, but that the workers get to choose who is empowered to decide. Also, no external shareholders are necessary, which ensures that the needs of workers are centred, rather than those of investors seeking a profit. (To be clear, Soft Chaos doesn't have external shareholders, but co-ops are not prevented from having them.)
Our by-laws make explicit the values and wants that we have and codify behaviour that aligns with those values. This helps us build fair labour practices, especially when working with non-members. Furthermore, while co-ops can be non-profit, they can also be a standard corporation. Laws vary by location for how your cooperative will incorporate. Soft Chaos is for-profit, for example, but we don't pay dividends, only salaries.
Finally, compared to other small businesses, worker co-ops have a higher success rate. Much higher. According to a 2019 report by the Democracy at Work Institute, cooperatives that are 6-10 years old have a 25.6% success rate, compared to 18.7% for all other small US businesses. Cooperatives that are 26 years old or more have a success rate of 14.7%, compared to 11.9% for all other small businesses.
Defining Sustainability (For Us)
What do we, Soft Chaos, want from sustainability?
We want to be debt-free and well-paid, which means we want to pay ourselves a living wage and choose not to go into debt to do that. We hope this will help us continue operations indefinitely.
We want creative control. We want to balance our creative practices and commercial work as best we can. We are artists and we want to nurture those needs, too.
We value interpersonal health. We care about our relationships to each other and maintaining them is paramount. We prioritize this for our well-being and the co-op's function.
We want collaborators with shared values, because working with others who share our values can provide an energetic boost; working against our values is draining and makes us hate our work.
And we want to do meaningful work at our own pace, because we want to do good in the world and we want to do it for a long time. We don't want to overwhelm ourselves by growing too big, too fast. We also don't want to burn out!
You should decide for yourselves what sustainability means in your work. We make a lot of assumptions about what sustainability means when making games. What is needed to sustain your practices as well as acting for the greater good, for example, socially, ecologically, or politically, might mean different things at different times. We suggest you take the time to do this exercise for yourselves. Here are some questions to help you get started.
Question 1: What gives you, as a studio, energy and joy? What takes it away?
Question 2: What financial viability goals do you have? Do you need to meet particular targets to stay in operation or to sustain your involvement? Is there flexibility here?
Question 3: Who do you want to work with, within and outside your studio? What shared values are non-negotiable? Are you aligned about these wishes?
Question 4: What are your access needs? What pace do you work at? How many projects can you switch between at a time? What environment do you need to thrive?
The Hit Factory vs. Our Service Model
Now we're going to get into the differences between the service-based model we've chosen versus relying on hit games like conventional indie darling wisdom says you're "supposed to".
In the Hit Factory model we usually hear about, studios must have a very financially successful game to be able to continue operations. We found this gives you less flexibility in what you can make, since you have to rely on previous market successes and can't do anything too weird or experimental. You also have to be hyper-sensitive to release schedules and announcements of other games.This makes for a more stressful launch and working environment than we were personally comfortable with. It also means studios are in pretty constant danger of closing: if it can happen to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it can happen to you!
That said, maybe your hits allow you to make weird side-projects sometimes! We hope so!
In a service-based model, the studio is sustained by successfully finding and satisfying client needs. We can use our diverse skills with clients and not limit ourselves to being paid by game development. Some of the skills we bring to the table include education, workshop facilitation, tool creation, fabrication, and so on. This helps us support causes that we value and work with our local communities. Meanwhile, we can pursue weird projects we're excited about, even if they have small audiences and little financial viability. As an added bonus, these games also act as advertising for our services, showing clients what we're capable of. So we still make cool games, even if they're not through the usual indie darling channels.
We would also like to note that most companies do engage in some of both practices. Again, think about what works best for you!
Our Structures of Care
So, how do we sustain ourselves? You might have some idea by now, but here are the things you haven't seen yet.
First off, not everyone works full-time at Soft Chaos. We take on different project loads at different times. We take other contracts to sustain ourselves financially, especially when the cooperative can't be hired directly because of red tape.
We also do monthly group therapy together, which we highly recommend. That said, we're only three people, so if your studio is bigger, you might find some other mechanism to help voice what is difficult to say and take care of each other.
Plus, we've formed an advisory board of experts who care about us personally as well as Soft Chaos's success to help guide our business development.
Another thing: NO FLUORESCENT LIGHTING! What we mean by this is that since all of us are neurospicy, we pay close attention to each of our accessibility needs and try to meet them.
Finally, we have a lot of fun together. Our 2024 holiday party involved doing the #1 escape room in the world according to TERPECA. We also do ridiculous group cosplays, and have been in each other's wedding parties.
Challenges and How We Deal
So, what problems get in the way of this magical unicorn of an outfit? (Just late capitalism things, baby.)
Feast or famine is hard to avoid with client work. Sometimes, we are offered more work than we can handle at the same time; sometimes we have dry spells. Either can be stressful and play on scarcity mindset fears. But, managing this collectively is much, much easier than doing so as a solo freelancer. We share the work of managing workload and finding new contracts.
There is the risk of overwork. We have had to learn the hard way how to say no, even to projects we love. We also have to define our scope of responsibility for clients we care about, too. We try to remember that saying no leaves us bandwidth to say yes to other important things or to taking care of ourselves.
It can be hard to make time for creativity. It's easy to want to squirrel away as much money as possible for the future all of the time, which takes away time from our own creative work, but creative fulfillment is what sustains us. We do this by creating what we call "Soft Chaos Originals" whenever we can -- usually shorter games that we can self-distribute or use as prototypes for other opportunities.
And then there are the "political situations". Some of our collaborators and clients are at the mercy of grants funding, whether arts- or academia-based. That funding is affected by who is in power. Also, fascism is stressful. There are no easy solutions here, but being together means we're not alone in those experiences.
Of course, we are still part of the game industry. For better or for worse, what happens in the game industry still affects us. Even though we try to do things differently, our clients' expectations are somewhat set by industry trends. We hope to positively influence the game industry to encourage better labour conditions for everyone. We think Game Workers should Unite, if you know what I mean.
tl;dr Takeaways
Do sustainability, your way. Sustainability is not one-size-fits-all. Your situation might be way different from ours and regional laws also apply. Take the time to think it through!
Remember that workers make games. Taking care of yourselves and others as workers is crucial to an innovative, sustainable, healthy industry. That means living wages, no crunch, and having some control, or agency, over what you do.
Be creative about revenue generation. Not every game is going to be a runaway hit. There may be clients who don't yet know they want a game and you may have skills that you can use in unusual ways.
Be true to your values. Working against your values to prioritize financial success won't result in sustainability. Make sure to aim to thrive rather than just survive. We know it's a tall order.
And, lastly, we love worker co-ops! Worker cooperatives are not a panacea, but they give workers space to imagine a different world. We think they're pretty great and you should consider founding one.
(photo credit: Patrick Garratt for Knowledge)