New indie label is aiming for a highly curated, distinct catalogue rather than a generalist approach of signing "whatever they think will sell"
A team of industry veterans from Critical Reflex, Gaijin Entertainment, and Nozomu Games has established the indie label Inner Pocket Publishing.
Inner Pocket's core team consists of four co-founders: CEO Artem Oleinik formely of Gaijin Entertainment; head of marketing Yaroslav Kadyshev, formerly of Critical Reflex; and Nozomu Games co-founders Ivan Bushmin and Eva Manuilovich, serving as head of publishing and art director, respectively.
Inner Pocket partnered with Nozomu Games to launch Burn With Me, an occult deck-burner where players sacrifice cards to gain powers, on PC. Other Inner Pocket titles include Hardlane Studio's Outcast Tales, Justcamh's Nonolith, and Jamwitch's The Archives of Trevosa.
The company is working with several developers on early-stage projects and has planned its line-up for the next six months. It seeks smaller games or projects near completion that need little or no additional development funding.
Inner Pocket is self-funded by its four founders and can currently invest up to $75,000 per project. "We started lean and intend to stay that way, so we're not planning to grow the team or sign too many games at once," Kadyshev tells GamesIndustry.biz. "We're a very small team with big ideas. Very indie."
Kadyshev believes the traditional generalist publisher model is less sustainable, so Inner Pocket is adopting a hybrid publisher-as-curator approach.
Inner Pocket is taking a page out of Pantaloon's book , which transitioned from being a newsletter recommending indie titles to becoming a publisher last year.
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