>Devolver Digital is nearing its tenth anniversary, having published somewhere in the ballpark of 100 games. It has a sizeable following for an independent publisher. It even has its own E3 press conference.
>It also only has 16 employees, all of whom work remotely. The company's official mailing address is a bird store owned by one of the company's founders. Kate Ludlow, who works in "SpecialOps" at Devolver, tells me she once had 2000 kazoos shipped there for a marketing campaign.
>"The reason we're able to do everything on such a big scale with so many people is that everybody we bring in is a multi-tool," she says. "Nobody does one thing. Anybody here, founding partners down, would take out the trash. Anybody would go on a Best Buy run and grab a cable. Every single person we bring in does more than one thing and does it well. We're talented motherfuckers."
>Nevertheless, 16 still feels small for what feels in scope to be such a large operation. But as co-founder Graeme Struthers puts it in a conversation with GamesIndustry.biz at GDC 2019, the company has technically tripled in size from its founding.
>"Devolver, for myself, Nigel [Lowrie], Mike [Wilson], Harry [Miller], and Rick [Stults] was essentially the realization that we couldn't get jobs anywhere else. So we figured the only thing to do is to make a job up, make a company up."
>Struthers and his fellow Devolver founders had known one another prior to Devolver's founding. Wilson, Miller, and Stults had founded Gathering of Developers in the late 90s, which later ended up as part of Take-Two. The group reformed for a company called Gamecock in 2007, which is where Struthers got involved, but after an acquisition by SouthPeak Games, its Austin office was shuttered and the founders were once more without work. But the men wanted to give publishing one more attempt.
gamesindustry.biz