Black Tabby Games slinks into game publishing with 1000xResist creator's next game
Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow developer Black Tabby Games is joining the ranks of indie developers taking their development success and giving support back to the game development community. Today the company announced it's jumping into game publishing, and its first title is Prove You're Human, from Sunset Visitor, the studio behind 1000xResist.
The label, named Black Tabby Publishing, is fully funding Prove You're Human and providing publishing and release management support for Sunset Visitor. "We're doing well enough that we can afford to make our games, and now we want to be able to help other people," said Black Tabby co-founder Abby Howard in an interview with Game Developer. "We're in a position where we can, so why wouldn't we?"
Tony Howard-Arias, her fellow co-founder, explained that the studio not only has the budget on hand to finish Scarlet Hollow, but it's already saved the projected budget for its ambitious third game. He said they began asking what they would do with the extra revenue from their existing games, and decided to pay it forward. The pair decided to fund Sunset Visitor's next game after hearing creative director Remy Siu explain the arduous pitch meetings he'd been in.
"It felt like the current publishing environment was not well-suited for specifically what he wanted to do," Howard-Arias said, saying they decided to fund Siu's idea with just a paper pitch.
Part of the problem Siu faced was that he wouldn't receive a "hard no" from publishers who didn't want to shut down a possible deal. But while they waffled, Sunset Visitor had bills to pay and staff to keep employed.
"We don't need every game we sign to be a smash hit"Siu said this kind of support was vital for the kind of game he's looking to make. Prove You're Human is a game with "full-motion video" (FMV), which means a large amount of its content is filmed with actors out in the real world. "We filmed in Summer of 2025 in order to catch the 'summer light,'" he said, alluding to both the unique sunlight provided during the season and the fact that once autumn hits in Vancouver, there are drastically fewer times of the day to film exterior locations.
"If you miss that time, you're delayed by 12 months....it's very helpful for this type of game where you have those real-world logistical [challenges]."
Unlike Innersloth, which stuck solely to funding independent games with the Outersloth fund, Black Tabby is deliberately going all-in as a publisher. Its founders intend to strike "fair" deals with recoup costs and allowing developers they sign with to retain full rights to their intellectual property.
"With Sunset Visitor, we have a very simple recoup rev share deal where it's 70 [percent] to us before recoup, and 30 [percent] to us after recoup," said Howard-Arias. "There's no recoup with interest or double recoup period or anything like that. It's just a three year term. Everything goes back to Sunset Visitor after three years."
He noted this is partly possible because Black Tabby Games employs a small number of people and has low overhead costs. "It's very lean, and we're not committing funds where if we don't release a game by X date and we don't recoup, then it puts our internal projects in danger....we don't need every game that we sign to be a smash hit."
In an ideal world, Howard said that Black Tabby would only sign with a developer "once," then that team would be "fully self-sufficient" afterwards.
Her co-founder took an even stronger swing, saying that the pair wanted to make sure Sunset Visitor would "never have to ask someone for money ever again" and be fully able to fund its own projects.
