When Ziff Davis laid off the entire 36-person Humble Games team in July 2024, it looked like the end of a story that ought to have had a much happier ending. An indie publisher with a track record of producing beloved games like Slay the Spire and A Hat in Time was simply shuttered, with the corporate parent citing "challenging economic times" and handing ongoing projects to an outside consultancy.
What nobody expected was that the story had a second chapter. Later that year, Humble Games' former leaders (Patmore and Mark Nash) formed GGG and cut a deal to help manage their old studio's back catalog. Now, with Ziff Davis eager to offload the publishing division, Good Games Group has acquired the full back catalog of over 50 Humble Games titles from Ziff Davis and has rebranded to Balor Games, positioning itself as a force in "triple-I" gaming.
This is where reasonable people can disagree about what happened. From a market efficiency standpoint, it looks like a success story. In total, the young studio now owns the publishing rights to over 60 indie titles. The Humble Games lineup includes (among others) Slay the Spire, A Hat in Time, SIGNALIS, Forager, Coral Island, Monaco and Wizard of Legend. Separate from the Humble transaction, Balor also bought the complete catalog of Firestoke Games (which shut down last August) and publishing rights to Fights in Tight Spaces. The original owners got their company back; the developers get continuity under leadership that understands indie publishing; and capital returned to productive use rather than sitting idle at a corporate parent that didn't know what to do with it.
Yet the underlying reason for this acquisition tells a bleaker story about modern gaming economics. According to sources, Humble Games' troubles stemmed from Ziff Davis wanting to see "an immediate increase in revenue after investing cash into a business, and unfortunately that's just not how games works." This isn't unusual. Major corporations bought their way into gaming expecting venture-capital returns on the timeline of software companies. When independent games don't hit explosive growth targets within a year or two, the parent company loses patience.
Balor's approach deliberately rejects this model. Balor Games is led by former Humble Games executives Alan Patmore and Mark Nash, who are positioning the new label not just as a publisher but as what they describe as a "cultural curator" for independent games. The company's strategy centres on providing long-term lifecycle support, community development, and publishing expertise while allowing studios to retain the creative identity that makes indie games unique. Nash said Balor isn't chasing scale for its own sake and is laser focused on helping its partners achieve their full potential. "Our focus is on providing sustained lifecycle support, community building, and thoughtful commercial strategy across platforms and regions," he continued.
There's something genuinely appealing about this vision, particularly after watching major corporations treat game studios as disposable assets. Patmore and Nash have skin in the game: they were laid off alongside their staff, and they're betting their own capital and reputation on a thesis that developer-friendly publishing can actually work.
Whether it will succeed, though, remains unclear. Backed by investment from MEP Capital, the company plans to expand its publishing operations while maintaining a selective approach centred on creative alignment and long-term partnership. That selective approach is admirable but risky. The indie publishing space is crowded, and Balor lacks the distribution muscle or financial reserves of larger publishers. Their advantage is ideological rather than structural: they understand what developers want because they've been fired for not delivering what corporations wanted.
The honest answer is nobody knows whether Balor will thrive or become another indie publisher that started with great intentions and ran out of runway. What we can say is that Patmore and Nash are trying to solve a real problem in a way that prioritises sustainable relationships over short-term extraction of value. In an industry repeatedly damaged by corporate cost-cutting, that deserves to be tried. Whether it proves viable at scale is a different question entirely.