Standing out in a crowded market: many of the best titles at Pax Australia in Melbourne came from New Zealand game developers. Standing out in a crowded market: many of the best titles at Pax Australia in Melbourne came from New Zealand game developers. 'Cool and quirky is part of our brand': how New Zealand became a hothouse for indie games T hose not immersed in the world of gaming might not be familiar with Pax Australia: the enormous gaming conference and exhibition that takes over the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre every October. My favourite section is always Pax Rising, a showcase of indie video games and tabletop, the majority Australian - but there has been a recent shift that was particularly notable this year: many of the standout titles had crossed the Tasman, arriving from New Zealand . At the booth run by Code - New Zealand's government-funded Centre for Digital Excellence - 18 Kiwi developers demoed their forthcoming games in a showcase of the vibrant local scene that was buzzing with crowds.

'There were, frankly, too many indie games to play in a day - a nice problem to have' gamers playing at SXSW Sydney Games Showcase 2025. 'There were, frankly, too many indie games to play in a day - a nice problem to have' gamers playing at SXSW Sydney Games Showcase 2025. Hyperkinetic shooters, gorgeous animal adventures and even a charming puzzler where you play a postie: Australia's developers are punching above their weight T here's no escaping the fact that SXSW Sydney - Australia's iteration of Austin's tech, music and film event, now in its third year - is absolutely beset by brands. In Tumbalong park on Saturday, families who had arrived for a free concert for kids meandered around the garish yellow CommBank Tour zone, as a line wound its way into the giant L'Oréal tent. But metres away at the International Convention Centre, inside the halls dedicated to gaming, the corporate influence was more muted.

As protests exploded in Los Angeles last weekend, elsewhere in the city, a coterie of games journalists and developers were gathered together to play new games at the industry's annual summer showcase. This week's issue is a dispatch from our correspondent Alyssa Mercante. Summer Game Fest (SGF), the annual Los Angeles-based gaming festival/marketing marathon, was set up to compete with the once-massive E3. It's taken a few years, but now it has replaced it. Whereas E3 used to commandeer the city's convention centre smack in the middle of downtown LA, SGF is off the beaten path, nestled among the reams of fabric in the Fashion District, adjacent to Skid Row.

When Netflix first started adding video games to its huge catalogue of streaming TV shows and films, it did so quietly. In 2021, after releasing an impressive experiment with the idea of interactive film in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in 2018 and a free Stranger Things game in 2019, Netflix began expanding more fully into interactive entertainment. The streamer's gaming offering, for a long time, was its best-kept secret. Whoever was running it really had an eye for quality: award-winningly brilliant and relatively little-known indie games comprised the majority of its catalogue, alongside decent licensed games based on everything from The Queen's Gambit to the reality dating show Too Hot to Handle. Subscribers could play games such as Before Your Eyes, a brief and touching story about a life cut short; Spiritfarer, about guiding lost souls to rest and Into the Breach, a superb sci-fi strategy game with robots v aliens.

The latest Day of the Devs showcase has come and gone, but the stream placed a spotlight on a whole bunch of promising indie games. The event is curated by Double Fine and iam8bit and this digital showcase highlighted dozens of in-progress titles to keep an eye on. The virtual show included some world premieres and release date announcements, along with a bunch of new trailers about games we already knew about. These are all vastly different titles, with their own publishers, genres, budgets and visual styles. They have just one thing in common.

Devolver Digital puts out a lot of good games and it's looking to spread that magic around to licensed content. The company just announced a sub-label called Big Fan Games that will specialize in developing indie titles based on pre-existing IPs. Devolver describes Big Fan Games as "a brand new label giving developers license to create original game adaptations using the worlds and characters of iconic film, television, and comic properties." To that end, the team is staffed with industry veterans who have worked with companies like Disney and Dark Horse Comics. Today we launch Big Fan ( @BigFanPresents) - a brand new label giving developers license to create original game adaptations using the worlds and characters of iconic film, television, and comic properties.

British-Indian game developer Charu Desodt believes the success of titles such as Venba has been thanks to their commitment to authenticity. "They make me feel very proud," she says. "We're coming to a point where the industry is growing massively, both in terms of hours spent gaming but more importantly in the variety of the games. "When you have authentic local stories told from the heart, that's something everyone can relate to." Charu says funding for "unique and quirky stories has been an issue" but recent successes such as Venba and Thirsty Suitors have shown there is an appetite for south Asian stories told by south Asian developers.

The massive success of Among Us changed the lives of the developers at Innersloth. Now, the team is paying that forward by helping to fund a bunch of other indie games under its new label Outersloth (perfect name, zero notes). Among the projects that Outersloth has backed so far are Mars First Logistics (a Mars rover building sim that went into early access last year), card battler RPG Battle Suit Aces, exploration game Mossfield Archives, single-button boss rush title One Btn Bosses and space dog fighting roguelike Rogue Eclipse. Strange Scaffold (An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs) and Visai Games (the fantastic Venba) are getting a hand from Outersloth too. Outersloth is also funding the next project from Outerloop Games, the team behind the acclaimed Thirsty Suitors.

It took Billy Basso seven years to make Animal Well, the dense, dark Metroidvania game that crashed onto Steam's top-seller chart earlier this month amid a flurry of player hype. The game is a labyrinth exercise where players wander a world inhabited by sometimes friendly, sometimes not-friendly creatures as a small, very able blob. It's emblematic of what's possible with indie games--a breed that could be on the brink of extinction. Animal Well is light on instruction. Part of the game is figuring out how to play. It all but requires players to interact in Discord or Reddit communities when their puzzle-solving dead-ends.

If you keep an eye on the gaming news at all, you might have heard about a strange little indie game in development over the last couple of years. Often stylized as "Pokemon with guns," Palworld is an odd Psyduck, a fusion of modern crafting games like Ark and Valheim with the familiar monster fighting of the world's most lucrative media franchise. Its launch this weekend was a shocking success, selling over five million copies, shooting it to the #3 concurrent player spot on Steam. No, Palworld gets the #1 spot with a bullet among recent releases. Only PUBG and Counter-Strike 2 have reached higher numbers. And that's apparently true despite the game being exclusive to Xbox and PC (missing the large PlayStation and Switch portions of the market) and being offered to millions of players for free via a day-one release on the Xbox Game Pass.