Causeway Studios bets a shared-universe game catalog can survive the Steam flood

A two-person indie video game studio in Northwest Arkansas making narrative PC games.

Entirely bootstrapped, no equity fundraising; bills paid with contract work for the University of Arkansas, Vanderbilt and Baylor.

Kjartan Kennedy and Greg Rogers, University of Arkansas graduates who became fast friends in class, started Causeway Studios in 2020 — one of the first video game companies in Northwest Arkansas — and paid the bills doing contract work for the University of Arkansas, Vanderbilt and Baylor.

After a year of development the studio released The Haunting of Joni Evers in mid-January 2025, a one-time $15 PC purchase on Steam. Kennedy called reviews and feedback from YouTube and Twitch influencer gamers "stellar" but said the studio struggled to get eyes on the game and sales were tough, with about 10,000 games released on Steam in 2023 and nearly double that in 2024.

It prices the business for survival: "evergreen, slightly profitable and stable" beats exit-chasing when visibility, not quality, is the scarce good.

Cross-selling a shared universe attacks the Steam discovery crisis directly — each release compounds the audience for the whole catalog.

Bootstrapping plus university contract work kept the studio alive nearly five years before its first title, an unusually long runway for game development.

When discovery, not quality, is the bottleneck, a catalog in one universe turns every launch into marketing for the last one — and lets a tiny studio optimize for stability rather than scale.

As of February 19, 2025, Causeway was in talks with angel investors and publishers for development funding to move its next game forward, which it hoped to launch by mid-2026. The plan is more games in the Worlds Across the Causeway universe that can cross-sell each other, still with no equity fundraising done.