Justin Woodward started out as one of the small cogs in the big wheel of the game industry. He studied game art and design in college. Then he got a job at a triple-A game company as a 3D background artist.
But he decided he would rather be a game designer instead of being one among many 3D artists. He started his own graphic design studio, doing tasks like logo design that could connect him with entrepreneurs. He learned how to fund projects and create businesses. He went on to create an indie game studio. He stayed on that path.
He eventually started The MIX, the Media Indie Exchange, to help game startups get noticed at big events like the Game Developers Conference. He picked up a lot of expertise along the way and now reviews more than 700 pitches a year while trying to find the best startups that deserve attention. In our session at GamesBeat Summit 2025, we did a fireside chat about his experiences. And we delved into the hidden ways that developers can find money, whether it’s through Kickstarter, platform companies, publishers, VCs and other means.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Our session today is “Game Funding Diversification for Indies.” I’m glad to be here with Justin Woodward, who has a long history in the game industry. I’ll have him go through some of it here. Can you talk to us about how you got going in the indie space?
Justin Woodward: I’ve been in the game industry for about 15 years now. I went to college for game art and design. Went to triple-A shortly after that as a 3D background artist. After that I really did not–during that time I really didn’t dig being a 3D artist. I wanted to be a designer. That’s what I went to school for, and a producer. As I started to figure out my own path, I started a graphic design studio where I used that to do graphic design, websites and logo designs, for entrepreneurs, in order to learn how to fund projects, learn how to create businesses, that kind of thing. And then right around that time, when I started the graphic design business, I started a master’s program in game production management. I started an independent game studio.
He stayed on that path and got to meet a lot of mentors in the game industry.
GamesBeat: When did you encounter that first need to go and get something from somebody?
Woodward: I was super broke. I was sleeping on the floor during my master’s program. I was looking into what it takes to get angel investment. This was 2009, around that time. Kickstarter had just started. We were one of the first Kickstarters, and we failed, which was very interesting. But every time there was an opportunity, we used that pitch to push it further. All the folks that took me under their wing, I used their mentorship to learn more.
At the time–I grew up in San Diego. There was High Moon Studios. Rockstar San Diego. PlayStation, Sony San Diego. One of my mentors was Clint Keith, who was sort of the grandfather of agile scrum. He took me to leadership workshops, if you remember–they had these things called leadership forums. He would take me and I would work with folks from EA, Ubisoft, all of these different triple-A companies, teaching them agile scrum. I would learn that as I was teaching, and then he was introducing me to other folks. I was a big fan of Oddworld Inhabitants. I got to meet Lorne Lanning, which was super crazy to me. In person. He was such a cool guy. I got the confidence to feel like I could do this.
GamesBeat: Who was the person who first gave you a break in terms of investment money?
Woodward: We were pitching the same game. We tried Kickstarter. Then we moved on to Nexon. Nexon was trying to get into indie stuff. Then this thing opened up called the IGN Indie Open House, around the end of 2010 and into 2011. I didn’t have money to go. I was in San Diego with my beat-up old Nissan Altima, sleeping on the floor. One of my mentors, who I met–she was from Venezuela. I was editing videos for her. She said, “If you take this opportunity to go up to San Francisco and get in, I’ll loan you $2,000 to cover it.”
We ended up on one of the leadership forum trips, which was interesting. I was already in San Francisco. I connected with the folks at IGN and said, “I’m in town. Can I meet you in person and pitch you?” They loved the idea. They basically gave me a week. “You have to make a decision to come up here in a week.” I went to Alicia and went to Clint and said, “What do you think I should do?” Clint said, “You have to take the bull by the balls and make this happen.” Alicia said she’d give me the $2,000. We packed our stuff and drove up to the bay. We didn’t know what would happen, anything like that. I was able to convince IGN to let me write blog pieces for my college for an additional $2,000 a month. That helped me pay for it.
We showed the pitch at GDC. We had a bunch of people come and check out the game. Then Alicia became the first investor. She invested $40,000. Adam Boyes, before he was at PlayStation, was taking me to Capcom and Konami and all these different places to pitch. I started getting the confidence to pitch. The next thing you know, the next step was I got a deal with Adult Swim Games. That pushed it over the top. That’s when I really understood how to get my grounding in funding.
GamesBeat: What were some observations about the indie ecosystem that you encountered over time? San Francisco in some ways became a Mecca for indies, but living expenses got so high that indies were priced out of the city. They had to go further out into Oakland and other parts of the bay. There’s always been this larger pattern that’s affected indies and determined whether or not they’re viable.
Woodward: It was very interesting during that time. You’d see this when you were in the business long enough, see the cycles of where things are going. At the time social gaming was the thing. Everyone was doing Facebook games.
GamesBeat: That was the actual reason GamesBeat and its first conference took off. Companies like Zynga had come on the scene, and everyone who was competing with them. All these social gaming folks were there. I’d left my job thinking I would never cover games again. I went to VentureBeat to cover startups, and there were no gaming startups at the time. But all of a sudden social gaming came along.
Woodward: There was a weird transition in the time with the arrival of social gaming, and also indie development. For the IGN Indie Open House, for example–GameSpy, which was a publication at the time, also did backend multiplayer work. They worked with Iron Galaxy and many others. That was their Indie Open House accelerator. They were trying to get information for indies about what’s next. They felt that indies would be the next big thing, which they were. Super Meat Boy was blowing up. There were all these huge breakouts in the indie space, alongside technology like Unity becoming popular. Unreal was working for indies. It created this landmark event.
San Francisco was definitely a Mecca for that. When social gaming saw a lot of layoffs, as the industry was moving toward mobile–if they didn’t make that shift, there were a lot of amazing, talented developers who wanted to start their own studios.
GamesBeat: Sometimes everyone questions whether that new trend is going to take off or not. But if it inspired all these investors to pour money into the game industry, it turned out to be a good thing. Get that money, take that money, and do what you could with it. Social gaming was one way. Mobile gaming was one way. In more modern times we’ve had blockchain gaming. All these things save a lot of game companies from going under, even if sometimes they didn’t want to do a blockchain game or something like that. It’s interesting that that trend has always been there.
There’s always been this fear, too, that everyone has had around the “indie apocalypse.” Did you feel that? Did you ever believe in that?
Woodward: I always thought it was BS. Everyone’s scared of all this stuff, but you have to know how to–I hustle. You have to know how to move around. As you just said, every time there’s a wave, you can ride that wave for funding. Around the time when we were starting, it was right when the PS4 was getting its feet. They needed content. It was taking so long for them to make first-party games. The budgets were ballooning, and the time it took. They jumped into indie. They started to invest in indie. PlayStation was dropping checks for around $200,000.
Every wave has this. You were talking about blockchain, which was interesting as well. That has also shifted now. Blockchain fell off, and investment is going back into traditional web 2.0. You just have to know how to ride those waves.
GamesBeat: We have to live up to the billing of our session here. Where is the money now? Where is the hidden money?
Woodward: You have to know where to look. That’s pretty obvious. But I just mentioned blockchain. A lot of folks who had blockchain money, they still have that money, but they’re looking to invest it in different ways. A lot of publishers got bought up by Embracer and Xbox and so on. Some of those companies got let go. Saber Interactive bought themselves out. They’re now looking to invest in smaller projects, because before that implosion, their projects were around $15-30 million. Now they’ve let go of these huge projects. They’re willing to invest in games that are closer to the $1-2 million range. Obviously there has to be due diligence for this, but if developers can make a game for $250,000 to $500,000, that’s also a market where they’re willing to make a bet that’s not so huge.
Companies with IP have been willing to make bets. We just released a game with Nickelodeon, a Rugrats game, in October. That was a smaller indie style of title with a big name. Shortly after they saw what we did, Paramount started to fund more independent projects. A lot of this has been popping up. Platforms, different funds–
GamesBeat: Meta put a lot of money into VR games.
Woodward: Exactly.
GamesBeat: How would you rate some of these different ways of getting money? You mentioned Kickstarter. There are platform companies, publishers, VCs. Where do you go first?
Woodward: It depends on where you’re at with your studio and your experience, and also your relationships. Independent publishers, that seems like a good bet, as well as platforms. If you have a good business plan and you feel like you’re going to be making a VC 10X-plus, then it makes sense to gravitate your game and your pitch toward that–I’m going to say it’s a game. Every time you communicate with a funder, you have to understand the vernacular. How do you communicate with them? They’re looking for certain things that others aren’t.
An independent publisher like Raw Fury or Devolver, they’re looking for creativity and talent. They’re looking for your next three games. Whereas VCs they’re looking for the money. How is this going to make money? That also rides waves, like AI. VCs are looking for AI. Previously it was blockchain. Every wave, they’re going to be looking for certain things to invest in, because they’re investing in multiple studios. That’s another thing to consider. Are you trying to fund your studio in the long term, or are you trying to fund one project? That’s also going to determine where a developer wants to go.
GamesBeat: In what capacity are you looking for games? What do you look for among the indies?
Woodward: I kind of skipped past this, but I run The MIX, the Media Indie Exchange. As I started my studio in San Francisco, I realized that there was a need for developers to get in contact with publishers, investors, and press. In 2012 I teamed up with some folks and we ran this event out of the IGN offices. We had an amazing group of people. We had Towerfall and Retro City Rampage, some big indies that showed up. It was packed. The next year I called it The MIX. It was even bigger. It was super grassroots. There was a line wrapped around the IGN building until we couldn’t even fit in there. We had to get other facilities. We started doing E3 and that type of thing.
Now we do four or five shows a year. We have one coming up during the Summer Game Fest. We have an online event and an in-person event. Now that this is my business, we have an obligation to our partners – one, the developers, two, the press, and then three, our sponsors – to have extremely good content. Any time we have an event, I look through, with my team, around 700 games. During a year I’ll probably look through 1,500 games or more. It’s interesting to see the different trends happening. When I’m talking to developers, I’m saying, “You have to do something extremely different.” If you’re trying to do another roguelike Metroidvania, you’re lost in the shuffle no matter how good it looks.
GamesBeat: What kind of games are getting traction?
Woodward: More emergent gameplay, where it doesn’t take as long to develop the game, but every time you play it’s different. That’s the roguelike genre, in a way, but what is your twist on it? How are you building your community? That kind of thing.
GamesBeat: Thinking about alternative sources, are there any we haven’t mentioned yet? Or is the money really not there right now? I see some publishers coming back. Acclaim just set up shop again under Alex Joseph. A few years ago there were something like 30 publishers that had gone out of business. When a publisher goes down they take so many developers down with them.
Woodward: I also helped to run the Humble Black Game Developer Fund for four years, where we funded developers’ prototypes. Humble Games–Ziff-Davis didn’t want to deal in that type of business anymore, so Humble Games shut down. What happens to all the talent there? Now there’s a holding company taking care of them. It’s very interesting. The thing about it that’s cool, though–none of that is cool as far as companies tanking, but for instance, Versus Evil was bought by TinyBuild. They bought a number of companies right before the crash. Those talented people who ran those studios are still out there. Now private investors want to invest in those people. They have money. But they’re privately looking for funds. You have to build your network and understand where those folks are at, what they’re looking for, and what ‘s out there.
GamesBeat: We’ve had real successes. Some triple-A games have failed, but they leave a hole in the market. Indies have moved in to take their place in the last couple of years. Helldivers 2, Palworld, Balatro. We’ve seen a large number of games with a single developer behind them, like Animal Well. What do you think is happening as you look at the patterns there?
Woodward: I definitely think there’s a hole in the market, especially in the middle, the double-A space. Tools are allowing developers to make double-A experiences, large experiences on lower budgets. Also, since the world is opening up as far as communication–it’s always been there, but you can now work with developers in Brazil, in Indonesia, in the Philippines, that kind of thing. You can have a simpatico relationship where it’s not just transactional. That’s opened up the potential for making games very lean and very quickly. A lot of independent developers fail when they’re trying to compete with market prices and that kind of thing, rather than negotiating how they’re doing business with vendors and the folks they work with. Really keeping it lean to flip that for a win. The delayed gratification of being an entrepreneur is real. You don’t want to raise $2 million and pay yourself $350,000. I’ve seen that kind of thing happen.
GamesBeat: I just came back from Gamescom Latam in Brazil. There were 130,000 people at the show. I met with lots of startups there. Newzoo puts them at about $7.7 billion in revenue out of the $180 billion or so for the whole game industry. It’s a smaller part of the market, but it’s growing at 6% a year. The U.S. is growing at only .5% per year or so. Looking at the Convoy data for the first quarter, there were zero deals between VCs and anyone in South America. Likewise there was nothing in Australia and nothing in Africa. All of the money went into Asia, Europe, and the United States.
I see a disconnect here. This is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world for games. It has a vibrant indie market. Yet nobody is putting money into it. The money financing whatever is happening in Latin America is all homegrown. That seems crazy.
Woodward: If anyone is investing, they should invest in those studios. We’re working with a studio right now, one of our partners, and they’re doing amazing work in full production. At The MIX we work with developers all over the world – Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia. We see so many great games now. The Latin American Game Showcase, David Lucio is running that. There are such great games coming up there that are now at The MIX or in Day of the Devs or any of these showcases, because they’re top notch. That’s where things are going to go. If investors are smart, they’re going to start looking there. I know there are a lot of taxes and regulations and hoops you have to jump through. It costs a bit more if you’re working with folks in, say, Brazil.
GamesBeat: If there are ways for underrepresented communities and game developers from those communities to get funding–is there advice you’d have on that front?
Woodward: From The MIX, I also started a nonprofit called Experience Studios, which has a fund, the XP Fund. We ran an accelerator with Netflix Games to help black developers. The nonprofit is also doing business as Black Voices in Gaming. We have a community that works with tons of professional developers. A lot of it is just access. Access to networks. Knowing where the funds are. Being prepared to do these pitches. But the talent is the same. Finding the money is the same. There may be additional funding options, like through our program. A lot of this has dried up due to the political climate.
Xbox has done a lot in the space. We work with them for their DAP program, the Developer Acceleration Program. They’ve been doing things behind the scenes for years that people didn’t know about. Those are the folks you want to talk to. Likewise PlayStation has had something behind the scenes. They’re not blasting it out to the world, but they’re funding projects from underrepresented devs.
The post On starting The Mix and finding diverse funding sources for indies | Justin Woodward appeared first on Venture Beat.
