We've got a great team, money in the bank, and financial independence": Glowmade

What the report says

Often when a studio is dropped by a major publisher, it leaves them in dire straits. The story is all too common and often ends in layoffs or outright closure.Not so for Guildford-based Glowmade. The company's online multiplayer title King of Meat shut down earlier this year as part of Amazon Game Studios' shifting focus. The developer's co-founder and studio head, Jonny Hopper, tells GamesIndustry.biz that the split was "very amicable".Glowmade owns all of its IP, and Hopper says that the studio was careful not to burn through the tech and retail giant's money while the partnership was in effect, leaving it with a war chest to fund it through the coming years.In fact, Hopper believes that Glowmade is in the strongest position it has ever been in as a company.

"We've got a great team. We've got money in the bank. We've got financial independence, and we've got a team who know how to ship games," he says. "That is a really strong position for anyone to be in. I'm not sitting here worrying how I'm going to pay people. They're outside of my office making cool stuff for me. That's a really nice place to be."Hopper says that the company was "responsible" with the money Amazon gave it, trying to balance paying Glowmade's staff good salaries and providing benefits while also looking to the future."You need to think about what's the business long-term, what happens if you get an absolute rug pull?" he says.

"We weren't necessarily expecting it because I think everyone wants their game to succeed. But when that does happen, you don't need to freak out because you've been planning for this. That's why we're actually in a really strong position right now."With King of Meat and Amazon in the rearview mirror, Glowmade has been working on a new title, a single-player game called Rogue Fortune that marries a Hades-esque roguelike with a Tetris-inspired inventory management puzzle game. The baseline replayability of main game pairs with the variety offered by the inventory management: picking up Tetris-piece relics and slotting them into the player board in different combinations grants the player different powers and abilities, to often extreme effect."The exciting bit is when players play this and they go, oh man, I've broken the game because I've suddenly got massively overpowered," grins Hopper.

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"The point is you're supposed to become walking Armageddon as you go around, and everything's on fire and exploding and the bad guys are all fighting each other because you cast a spell on them." The branching options are what elevates the replayability beyond the procedurally-generated maps, and after the player's inevitable death – this is a roguelike, after all – levels, unlocks and weapons persist.Development started in January – a month before Amazon announced the King of Meat shutdown – with a deliberately limited scope."I sent quite a small prototype team off at the start of the year and said: 'Let's see what we can come up with in this kind of space, but you can't have any artists'," Hopper explains.

"There were no artists on the team for about three months because we wanted them to just absolutely focus on mechanics and building out this kind of idea."Rogue Fortune is the polar opposite to King of Meat by design. Glowmade's previous project was originally pitched in 2020 targeting a September 2021 release date. "Obviously that didn't happen," Hopper laughs (the game eventually launched in October 2025). Rogue Fortune was announced at Gamescom 2026, and Glowmade is targeting a 2027 release date."The idea is that this is a palate cleanser; how can we do something that's really fun that we're really interested in, but also not make it take forever or cost the earth," Hopper continues.

"When we started out this process, I said to the team: 'Let's build an idea that we can do in 12 months'. That wasn't necessarily because I wanted to do it in 12 months, because things always take longer than that, but it's more like constraining the thinking and giving those constraints and focusing the mind on we're not going to build an MMO or something enormous. We're not going to do that. We're going to try and have a small idea that will obviously expand a little bit."Amazon told Glowmade at the start of 2026 that King of Meat was going to be shut down.