Jason Avent’s Hardball Games closing down

Jason Avent’s studio Hardball Games is closing down just over three years after it was founded.

Avent, who was previously MD at CSR Racing developer Boss Alien, co-founded the company with another Boss Alien alum, creative director Chris Bowles, and TT Odyssey technical director Julian Adams.

In February 2023 the developer raised £4.3 million ($5.2m) from a seed funding round led by Griffing Gaming Partners with participation from Playdemic founders Paul Gouge and Alex Rigby.

The developer had worked on 16-player beat-em-up party brawler OutRage: Fight Fest, which released on Steam last year. 

“The money taps all turned off”

In a LinkedIn post, Avent said the team had hoped to secure more funds early on in development to release on all platforms as a free-to-play title. 

“But gradually during 2023, the market went cold, the money taps all turned off and the conversations we were having all went dry,” he said.

“So we had to pivot to a paid game and reduce our platform ambitions to just PC.”

He added: “A great core game is not enough to guarantee success any more. We found it very tough to find an audience despite positive reviews. There are an incredible amount of games out there with hundreds if not thousands of new releases each month. Competition is intense. 

“Nextfest used to showcase maybe a hundred games, now they include thousands. What's more, there are probably 30 to 40 huge, evergreen games that effectively run as services hoovering up people's play time as well. That's before you consider that players spend more time watching TV and short-form video than they used to.

“I've been making games for 30 years now and I've never known it to be as tough a business as it currently is. Especially for smaller teams.

“It's a miracle that games like Balatro and Clair Obscur break through all the noise. Unlike them, I think we were trying to make something mass market that ended up being targeted wrongly at a niche Steam audience.

“It's a symptom of the fact that we started off in one direction with a set of really positive market conditions and had to change direction suddenly in the middle of development to respond to far less favourable conditions. It's a great learning experience. I still very much love the games industry and believe in its future.”