You don’t want to do realistic graphics and animations. You only have a certain budget, you have a certain number of team members. As a result, the game becomes much less focused.Īs an indie, you have to embrace constraints. They have so many resources they can basically do everything. It is a little bit strange to say, but I’m a big fan of that. But it’s fine because these constraints give us direction. I have a feeling that Cloudpunk has gotten us where we can be feasible in the long term. Would you say that with ION LANDS you were able to get to that sweet spot in terms of quality, development time and player base? It’s a long journey and you often make mistakes. And we should be able to find an audience for these games that is feasible for us as an indie studio. These have to be games that we can make to our quality standards and within a reasonable time frame like two or three years. So, in 2015, I founded ION LANDS to produce the narrative-driven visual experiences that I myself would like to play. You need a lot more resources, you need to be a lot bigger to even reach a critical mass of players for these games to make sense. So I finally realized that online games might just be too much for an indie studio. This learning experience had its nice times, but it was also very stressful and draining. My first project was an MMO, and I continued with online games for quite some time. What made you keep reinventing yourself and never settle? Oleg Nesterenko, managing editor at GWO: Marko, you founded several studios and worked in very different genres, including MOBA, MMORPG, as well as single-player experiences both on mobile and PC.

Voxel art maker