Celeste 为 EXOK 的独立买单：销量百万、无发行商，然后回归小团队

做的是什么生意

Extremely OK Games (EXOK), formerly Matt Makes Games, is a Vancouver indie studio founded by Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry that develops and self-publishes its own games, including TowerFall and Celeste.

启动资金：No publisher or venture money is documented: Matt Makes Games self-published Celeste — co-founder Noel Berry said the label was simply the most direct path to publish on platforms — and the game's success funded the team's move into a shared Vancouver studio (IGN).

起因

Celeste was released in January 2018 by Matt Makes Games, the studio of designers Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry, who lived together while developing it (VideoGamer, IGN). It sold over 500,000 copies during 2018, its launch year.

经过

The game's success let the pair formalize what had been a remote collaboration: EXOK was incorporated in March 2019 and announced that September, bringing a six-person team — including artists from Brazil and an American 3D artist — into a two-room Vancouver office. Celeste passed one million copies sold by early 2020, and the free Chapter 9 DLC arrived during the transition (IGN).

结果

EXOK then spent years on Earthblade, a bigger game, and on 2025-01-22 announced it was cancelled. Thorson wrote that Celeste's success had pressured the team to deliver "something bigger and better", that a split with a founding member had prompted a hard look at the project, and that "scaling the core team up post-Celeste has ultimately been a failure"; the studio is returning to small-scale prototyping at its own pace (EXOK).

可借鉴之处

一款热门作品能买来独立，却买不来可复制的方法论：Celeste 的销量让 EXOK 得以无视发行商和投资人，但扩大规模失败——持久的形式是当初制作 Celeste 的那个小而自主的团队。