David Gaider’s heist RPG needs publisher money, and praise still isn't closing the gap

David Gaider, the setting creator behind Dragon Age at BioWare and now co-founder of Summerfall Studios, says his heist RPG is “make or break” for the studio. He also makes the problem painfully clear: publishers have offered positive signals, but they are still not stumping up the funds needed to complete the game. The result is a pitch that keeps getting pulled forward in scope, not forward in cash.

The immediate story is simple and brutal. Summerfall’s first prototype was “a much simpler version.” Gaider says they built a vertical slice, roughly of the quality level they intended to release at, plus additional material at a simpler version to show publishers the direction. Then the publishers asked for more, specifically “to see this further along,” which forced the team to expand and ramp up the prototype further. In other words: the project is being stretched to match expectations, while funding decisions remain delayed. That mismatch is the beating heart of the industry’s funding logic right now, and it is why Gaider is calling it “make or break.”

Zoom out a bit and you get the macro reason this keeps happening. Gaider describes the industry as being in a multi-year contraction, saying it has been “almost three years” of studios clenching at once. The most visible effect has been layoffs, but he frames layoffs as a symptom rather than the disease. The funding side, he argues, is where the real bottleneck lives: publishers do not want to commit unless they believe it is a sure thing, and “that boils down to existing IPs, sequels, that sort of thing.” New projects are struggling because the baseline assumption is that publishers will avoid risk until something looks nearly inevitable.

Gaider’s “sure thing” critique gets a concrete example from his own dealings. He says a publisher he spoke with effectively admitted they were waiting for the project to be finished before committing. In the kindest version of that scenario, they are trying to reduce risk at the end of the pipeline. In the harsher version, it leaves smaller studios in limbo: lots of work, not enough funding, and no guarantee that the additional months of progress will translate into an actual production greenlight. Gaider notes that “there’s a lot of smaller studios like ours that are really struggling at this point.” Even with “great reception,” enthusiasm does not equal a funding commitment.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Gaider points to how even commercially minded planning can get derailed by market timing and blockbuster gravity. Summerfall previously made Stray Gods, a narrative experience that played like a classic Telltale story, but with musical numbers adapting to your choices. Gaider says he believes Baldur’s Gate 3 torpedoed Stray Gods’ chance at commercial success. He frames it as an unexpected timing collision: “I was kind of raw about that,” he says, and credits Larian with pulling the Baldur’s Gate 3 launch date forward and placing it right on top of Stray Gods. He claims the move was almost unheard of, and that Larian was nervous, particularly about “of all things, Starfield.”

Summerfall’s response shows another second-order effect executives should care about: when major publishers hesitate, studios look for runway with side products. After Stray Gods, the company made DLC and built Malys, a narrative-focused deckbuilder starring an exorcist on a motorbike. Gaider says they “really didn’t expect Malys to make any money,” describing it as a side project designed to keep all hands at the studio busy while they worked on the main heist RPG prototype. If Malys sold better, he suggests, they might have had a longer runway to finish the prototype. But instead, the funding problem circles back to the same place: the studio must find enough support to get from “prototype extended to satisfy publisher requests” to “game finished.”

There is also an important creative point here, and it matters because creative direction tends to attract investment only when it is legible as market fit. Gaider is positioning this heist RPG as something lighter than his prior work, saying he wanted something “not full-on comedy” but that could “make me smile.” He describes playing a crew of rogues in an airship who do heists, with the story eventually becoming more of a “typical RPG.” But he also argues for friction as a writing principle, drawing a line from his BioWare experience to what he calls the loss of tension in later games. He says characters need the ability to be unhappy with your decisions, and possibly even turn on you, because without real loss you lose tension and persuasion. He points to how BioWare shifted over time, with thinking focused on not letting players accidentally screw themselves and on keeping followers agreeable so players can always finish the game.

When Gaider talks about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, he frames it through process and constraints rather than just reception. Veilguard came out in 2024, and Gaider says he did not play it because he knows too much about what went on behind the scenes. He argues Electronic Arts “really did a number on them in terms of setting them up to fail.” He also connects the design philosophy gap to the critique that Veilguard lacked friction: too few conflicting ideologies and too few chances for allies to break with you. For executives and board members, the takeaway is uncomfortable but clear: in a risk-averse funding environment, the industry pushes projects toward safer structures, and that safety can cost the very tension that creates character-driven commitment.

For Summerfall, the strategic stake is direct: without publisher cash that matches the progress already demanded, Gaider’s studio is under “lots of stress” while trying to complete a prototype that has already been expanded. For everyone else building games, running studios, or approving capital, the story is the same even when the genres change: publisher enthusiasm can move quickly, but funding commitments arrive only when risk looks lowest. If that gap stays wide, the projects that rely on new ideas, new mechanics, or new narrative risk are the ones that get squeezed first.