Supergiant Games

What Supergiant Games is

Supergiant Games is an independent game studio based in San Francisco. Its homepage states that the studio has been creating video games since 2009, which is how the company dates itself, and it describes the studio plainly as independent. That word carries weight here: it means no parent company sits above the team deciding which platforms its games reach or when they ship.

The studio develops and publishes its own games. Its Steam listing for Hades names Supergiant Games as both developer and publisher, and the studio's own game pages link to every storefront where a title is sold, including Steam, the Microsoft Store, the Epic Games Store, Nintendo's store and the PlayStation Store. That combination is less common among studios of this size and it shapes how the company describes itself.

A studio that publishes itself

Publishing in-house means announcements arrive from the studio rather than from a third-party publisher's marketing department. News about the sequel to Hades, concert performances of its music and the release of the games on further consoles all appear on Supergiant's own blog, dated and written by the team. For a reader checking a claim, that is a useful property: the studio is the origin of its own announcements rather than a partner describing them.

It also means the studio is the party responsible for platform decisions. The page for Hades on the studio's site lists every storefront where the game is available, and the studio's blog posts announce when that list changes. No outside publisher page is needed to confirm what the game runs on, when it arrived there, or which console versions exist alongside the PC release.

Hades

Hades is the title that brings Supergiant into our database. Its Steam page lists a full release on 17 September 2020, an early access release on 10 December 2019, and Supergiant Games as both developer and publisher. The game is a rogue-like dungeon crawler set in the Underworld of Greek myth, and the store text places it alongside the studio's earlier action games as a combination of their systems.

The studio's own page for the game keeps to the same facts and adds links to each store where it is sold, from PC storefronts to console stores. Between the two sources a reader can establish the release dates, the platforms and the developer and publisher without relying on anyone outside the company. What neither page does is give sales numbers, and the studio has not published a figure for the game on its own site.

What the studio's own material covers

Supergiant's public material is small and consistent: one line describing the studio, a games index, a blog and links to stores. The blog doubles as the company's news feed and carries items about ports, concerts and development milestones rather than corporate announcements. Nothing on the site suggests a parent company, a stock listing or an outside owner, and the description the studio gives of itself is the same one used in its store listings.

That makes the studio easy to verify and hard to overstate. The claims an official profile can support are the location, the year the studio began, the games it lists and the platforms those games appear on. Anything about revenue, headcount or internal process would have to come from somewhere other than the studio, because the studio itself publishes nothing of the kind.

Games

• Bastion
• Hades
• Hades II
• Pyre
• Transistor

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