If you've been online this week, you've probably seen the games industry described as being in crisis. But hearing it from Christofer Sundberg, the veteran developer who created the Just Cause franchise and co-founded Avalanche Studios, still lands differently. In a candid interview with wccftech, Sundberg said he has "never experienced such a desperate, cowardly (they call it 'risk averse'), and confused state of the business" across more than three decades of making games.
That is not a throwaway hot take from someone on the sidelines. Sundberg is currently running his own studio, Liquid Swords, which he founded in 2020 after leaving Avalanche. He is living the exact conditions he is describing.
The Hangover Is Still Going
Sundberg pointed squarely at the pandemic-era investment boom of 2021 to 2023 as the source of the current pain. As reported by GameSpot, he described the fallout as a "hangover" that has been dragging on for three years. The numbers back him up. According to industry tracking, an estimated 45,000 jobs were lost across the games sector between 2022 and July 2025, with the cuts peaking in the first quarter of 2024 when more than 8,600 roles disappeared in a single three-month period. A 2025 Game Developers Conference survey found that one-third of US-based game industry workers reported being laid off over the previous two years.
The diagnosis from developers surveyed by the GDC was consistent: Covid-era overexpansion, rising production costs, and unrealistic expectations for blockbuster hits combined to create a perfect storm. Investors poured money in when the pandemic pushed gaming audiences to record highs, then pulled back when those highs proved unsustainable.
Liquid Swords was not immune. Sundberg confirmed that the studio cut half its development team in 2025, a decision he framed as buying the company "a longer runway" to finish its debut title.
Betting on Lean
That debut title is Samson: A Tyndalston Story, a single-player noir crime game launching on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store on April 8 for US$24.99. The game puts players in the shoes of Samson McCray, a former enforcer returning to the fictional city of Tyndalston with a mounting debt and a city full of people who want him to pay it. There are no microtransactions and no multiplayer, and the main story runs around 10 hours.
For Australian players, the mid-range price point is worth watching. In a market where new AAA releases routinely land at AU$109 or higher, a focused, story-complete experience at roughly AU$38 (at current exchange rates) represents a genuinely different proposition. The catch, as is so often the case for PC titles from smaller studios, is that there is no confirmed console release date yet.
Sundberg described Samson as a deliberate statement against excess. "We made a bet, and we do everything we can to deliver a fun $25 experience to lay the foundation for the future," he said. The game draws on the team's history with Just Cause and the 2015 Mad Max game, but trades open-world chaos for tight, consequence-driven design where player decisions permanently shape how the city responds.
Is Lean the Answer?
Let's be real: Sundberg's framing deserves some scrutiny. The narrative of scrappy, focused studios triumphing over bloated AAA publishers is appealing, but it is not guaranteed. Plenty of lean, well-intentioned games have launched at modest price points and still failed to find audiences in a crowded market. The indie space is as competitive as the AAA tier, just with smaller financial cushions when things go wrong.
There is also a fair counter-argument from within the industry. Some economists and analysts point out that the pandemic contraction was not purely a story of reckless spending; it reflected a genuine structural challenge in predicting long-term audience behaviour, compounded by global inflation and rising interest rates that made borrowing for development far more expensive. Calling executives "cowardly" for adopting risk-averse postures in that environment is understandable from a creative standpoint, but the financial pressures were real.
The GDC survey data, while grim, also carries a cautious note of optimism: the market showed early signs of returning to growth through 2025, and several major releases scheduled for 2025 and 2026 have attracted strong commercial interest. The industry is not finished; it is recalibrating.
What Sundberg's situation actually illustrates is the genuine trade-off between ambition and survival that studios of every size are now navigating. A generation of games that were greenlit during the boom years is now arriving into a market that has less tolerance for expensive experiments and long development cycles. The studios that survive will likely be those that, like Liquid Swords, found a way to ship something real with whatever resources they had left. Whether Samson justifies that bet will become clear on April 8.