Starform launched Metalstorm in November 2023. By the time the Seattle studio raised $6 million from Bitkraft in late 2024, the 5v5 air-combat game had three million players across the App Store, Google Play and the Epic Games Store. Lou Fasulo, CEO and co-founder, now puts that figure at 15 million.

We caught up with him at SLICE 2026 in Seattle, where he appeared on a panel about how indie teams get built, to ask what AI has actually changed, why the studio isn't raising and how a team of 26 keeps up with 15 million players.

Fasulo won't oversell the term his studio uses about itself. "AI-native is more of a journey than it is a state. And I wouldn't say that AI enables us to do something we couldn't already do."

What changed was throughput. "We've shipped way more features. We've addressed so much more feedback from players and ultimately we have a better player experience."

The internal framing for the team means mundane work at one end, judgement calls at the other. "The more our team gets to be on the higher order of that decision making and creativity, the more a small team can be ambitious."

He is equally clear about the limit. Responding to one-prompt-one-game demos recently, he counted the decisions behind a single Metalstorm aircraft - acceleration curve, energy bleed in a hard turn, silhouette readability at 800 metres.

” Across a full game, he thinks the count runs into the tens of thousands.

Source link