Why supporting indies is the key to growing the Brazilian games industry

"Juliana, I sold a company that I don't have, can you come and make me a company?"

Juliana Brito became the co-founder and CEO of indie accelerator programme Indie Hero after her business partner Ian Rochlin went to reality TV series Shark Tank Brazil and sold 25% of the not-yet-launched company for R$1. Yes, your read that correctly.

"The video went viral," Brito smiles, remembering Rochlin's Shark Tank appearance and his phone call to her about needing help to set up the company. "At the time, we [already] had Game Jam Plus, the biggest game development marathon competition in the world. We are in 42 countries right now; we had 5,000 participants last year.

"And then he went to Shark Tank and he did a pitch about a company that would be the biggest game producer without producing games."

Rochlin's gambit was to only ask for a $R1 investment because he deemed it more important to have investors on his side rather than money. That paid off and securing their support opened many doors for the duo, leading to the creation of Indie Hero.

The accelerator programme primarily works as a platform which connects Brazilian developers with investors. But from that initial idea of supporting indies, Indie Hero noticed other needs: while there was funding available, most studios "were not ready for it," Brito says.

So the firm took a step back and also included support to learn how to pitch, how to self publish, and more.

"We started to see other kinds of necessities for the indies, so we started organising B2B events, [and] we started organising Brazilian Game Fest, a B2C event so [studios] can actually grow [their] social media, and we just kind of grew around that," Brito continues. "Because our mission is that everyone who wants to [make a living] from [making] games should be able to do it. The industry is big enough, and there's enough money in it that we can actually provide that. So it's an acceleration programme, events, and all this kind of stuff."

"I think the biggest challenge for [game developers in Brazil] is to see themselves as entrepreneurs"

Game Jam Plus and Indie Hero have 1,500 mentors around the world to support budding talent. The company is also about helping Brazilian developers set up their studios from a more practical point of view, as they're often focused on the game and not the business.

"I think the biggest challenge for [game developers in Brazil] is to see themselves as entrepreneurs," Brito says. "They go through a lot of challenges to understand that in order to do the game they want to do, they actually have to build a business around it. And so that's very hard for them and sometimes takes years before they either get a business partner that will take this part, or [realise], 'Okay, we have to do it'."

The recent adoption of a legal framework for games in Brazil has been a monumental step forward in this regard; something you can read more about in this article about the implications of the breakthrough legislation in the country.

That's all the more welcome that Brazil has a very fertile ground for the games industry, having grown exponentially in the past decade.

"Brazil has 120 million players," Brito says. "That's because we don't have 100% penetration of smartphones yet, we have 80%, so there are still people who don't have smartphones that are acquiring [them] right now. And also some regions that are [still] getting the internet. So this number is going to grow.

"We are the tenth biggest game economy in the world today. So I think there's a huge opportunity for us to look to our own market to provide games that would be meaningful to the Brazilian population itself, with some regional things that we will identify ourselves with. Most of the 120 million people are playing AAA games, but they do like indie games. I think there is an untapped market."

Brito runs an event called Brasília Game Festival in the country's capital, and she says the enthusiasm for indies has been increasingly noticeable.

"We received 60,000 people in May there, and the indie alley was one of the most visited areas of the event. We had 36 indie studios, they were fully booked the whole time, a lot of the studios did sales, and we had an average of 800% growth in [social media] followers during three days of events. That shows we have a public with an appetite for indie games, if we know how to tap that. And that comes [back] to the biggest difficulty for indie developers, to see themselves as a business. You're doing business, not a game."

"We're not Europe, but there's still more funds [in Brazil] than anywhere else in Latin America"

The number of public funds has also increased over the past three years, Brito says, thanks for instance to the Paulo Gustavo law, a public funding initiative to help the audiovisual sector recover post-COVID. She also mentions the Aldir Blanc cultural fund, launched in 2023 as the largest public investment into the cultural sector in Brazil's history at $R15 billion ($2.6 billion).

"We have some public funds for gaming that we didn't have in the past, and besides that we have now two venture capitalists that have funds for games," Brito says, naming Osten Games and Bossa Nova Games. "And that's something that happened in the last two years, so that was pretty cool."

She adds: "So we're not Europe, but there's still, I think, more funds than anywhere else in Latin America."

Being able to fund new studios is a cornerstone of growing the Brazilian games industry because, as Brito puts it, it simply does not exist without indie developers.

"The Brazilian industry is done by the indies. We don't have any AAA studios here. So if you say you're going to grow our industry, you should grow the indie game industry. That's the only thing we can grow. We have big companies like Kokku, Dumativa, Puga, that do a lot of outsourcing for AAA studios, but they are not the main part of our market – they will be 10% of our market maybe."

Brazil does have prominent mobile studio Wildlife (which recently cut its workforce), while one of its biggest studios, Aquiris, got acquired by Epic in 2023 to form Epic Games Brasil.

"And now we have Hermit Crab and Gazeus also [making] some millions," Brito continues, mentioning the diversity of Brazilian indie studios and its "healthy ecosystem" with developers working across all platforms and genres (there were 1,042 studios in Brazil as of last year).

"We need a healthy base of small studios so we can keep a [sustainable] market. To actually have success, to use a pyramid [image], you have to have a lot of studios at the base, and then you get some in the middle, then you get some at the top. All industries are like that, so we need to have a healthy base so we can actually have an ecosystem. It's super important to support indie studios. And everybody also knows that the real innovation will come from indie studios in the world. The big studios and publishers are not innovating, because it's a big risk. The ones that are trying to do new kinds of games are the indies. That's where the innovation will come from."

Looking ahead, Indie Hero is hoping to provide more support to the indies it works with, and help them rise to the top.

"We are building platforms to become, not a publisher in itself, but to help distribute more games. So we are looking to educate the Brazilian and the Latin America publics in general, to not just play big games but also to play indies. All our actions aim to do that right now, to actually build a community, and produce content so that all of these studios can find their own niche inside of our community."

She continues: "We're doing deals with some [developers], just so they can get some cash going inside the studio, and actually get some traction. Our goal is to actually [teach developers] how to be financially stable and to bring some recurring revenue. With some studios, we did, like, 'Do a game a month', and then they launched them on Steam to generate $500 or $1,000 monthly. In dollars, that's a lot for Brazilians. Now we're doing this kind of stuff so they can actually have some ways that the studio doesn't go broke while they are working on a bigger intellectual property. Our mission right now is about solidifying this day-to-day for the studios."

Additional reporting by James Batchelor