We regret to inform our players, partners and friends that Alterego Games is closing down its studio.
We’ve been around for eleven years, creating the card game Intrigo: Muiters van de Zeven Zeeën, and the adventure games: Woven, Sanity of Morris and City of Springs.
We devoted our last year and a half to creating Broken Shores (working title). In short: a couch co-op adventure game where you retrace the steps of an ancient expedition by flying car, along the isles of future Europe. We have collated some information and made the demo publicly available here: https://bit.ly/BrokenShores2025
Wanting to give this game a broader reach than our previous titles, we felt we had to approach development differently if we wanted to make a real impact with our small team of six. This meant bold decisions.
Instead of having just a small number of people conceptualise and take full creative control over the game, every team member was now given ownership over the game.
We shifted away from realistic graphics and into a more stylised and cosy art style.
We chose a game genre we hadn’t worked in before, but that we liked, was popular, yet not overcrowded with competitors.
Furthermore, we had the game tested with an expert panel representing our target audience at every milestone: Concept art, paper prototypes, programmed prototypes and finally our vertical slice demo.
The result was the most polished and enjoyable game experience we’ve ever put into someone’s hands (measured in player feedback, starlit eyes and laughter, a lot of it.)
We funded the pre-production phase with funds we had accumulated over the years, and got help of the Creative Europe fund. That gave us the chance to show the quality of the project and pitch not just a vision, but a direct view of the product.
Sadly, we failed to convince Publishers to take a chance on what remains a tricky space: Local co-op gaming.
Looking back, we still wholeheartedly believe in the game’s concept and the quality of our work. stand behind the concept of the game, and the quality of the vertical slice demo that we showcased. Players genuinely enjoyed it, because we devoted so much time to bringing them into our process and shaping the game around their needs.
What we didn’t realise quickly enough was just how hesitant publishers are when it comes to local co-op Games. The market is indeed underserved: There’s just a handful of dedicated games you can play as a couple, and a lot of those are actually created with two gamers in mind, barring non-gaming partners from playing. But the lack of competition didn’t reassure publishers; it made them wary.
In hindsight, our pitch should not have been focused on the lack of competition, but rather on why this game would succeed. On how our game was tailored to accommodate non-gaming partners as well. On why the games that did have success did so, and how we built on that, with the eye-catching aesthetic and emotional story content.
We would have loved the chance to pivot our pitch and go another round of pitches and negotiations, but we stretched our funds as far as we could.
We would not like our story of 11 years of hard work to end with a chapter of debts, so we are calling it a day.
It’s been an honour creating games under the Alterego Games banner.
Although the studio is closing, we’ll keep the name and continue to manage the IP’s we have out there, in our spare time.
Thank you all for being a part of our journey, and a special shoutout to all those at Dotslash and the DGA community who supported us over the last months, and a big thank you to everyone who played our games and enjoyed our stories.