Brooke Burgess has spent 18 months hunting for roughly $1.5 million to fund his debut directorial project, Fallen, and has nothing to show for it beyond a handful of "under review" notes from publishers.

The ask — a two-and-a-half-year development cycle on a small team — sits well above what most investors will commit to a single indie project in 2025. "The majority are going for the scattershot [approach]," Burgess told Game Dev Wire. At DevGAMM Lisbon in November, he pitched to an open room; positive comments followed, but so did a consistent ceiling. "The overall message was that anything above $500,000 was out of the comfort zone of potential investors."

That ceiling reflects a broader industry pivot. Devolver Digital and 11-Bit Studios have publicly narrowed their publishing focus toward smaller, cheaper titles. "There's less investment on the line, so you can do things that are a little more outside the box," Devolver co-founder Nigel Lowrie said in a recent GamesIndustry.biz interview. "There's less risk, both for us and for the developer." The implied model: many small bets across micro-indies, hoping one becomes the next Balatro. Devolver's own million-selling Ball x Pit validated the math.

What does $1.5 million actually buy?

Burgess's business plan covers a small team working roughly two and a half years, with external art, localization, and marketing brought in as needed. The game itself is an action-adventure built in Unreal Engine 5 — a mix of combat and exploration inspired by Hyper Light Drifter, Tunic, and Death's Door, starring an angel named Astra who is sent to shut hell down. The premise asks why hell was constructed in the first place. Mechanically, players can condemn souls (yielding combat buffs), forgive them (linking to archangel summons reminiscent of Final Fantasy), or abandon them (unlocking secret paths and hidden bosses).

Tonally, Burgess is chasing the Xbox 360-era register of Darksiders and Dante's Inferno — a self-contained single-player experience, not a 40-to-60-hour open world. The 2024 commercial run of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, which drove record results for Pullup Entertainment, suggests the audience appetite for that register is real.

Why isn't anyone biting?

Two sticking points keep surfacing in publisher meetings. The first is Burgess's first-time director status. "There's a little nervousness about that," he acknowledged, though his resume — producer at EA in the late 1990s, followed by years of narrative consulting — undercuts the concern.

The second is AI. Every publisher Burgess has approached has asked the same question. "Every publisher I've talked to has brought up: 'So, have you thought about how AI might be able to save money on this?' Almost all of them. They want to know that you're thinking about it, that you understand the potential."

He has earmarked AI for localization support, QA, and animating the Renaissance-style paintings that populate his version of hell. He estimates those uses cut his ask from $1.8 million to $1.5 million.

Burgess is not a convert. "I'm not waving the flag of AI by any stretch, because I've seen some awful outputs from some of my own work," he said. "I would never allow AI to write any dialogue, ever." The integration, in his framing, is a cost-control measure with creative guardrails. "If integrating it in a way that doesn't affect creativity, but helps to save a little bit of money and gets the game out there to people… it's something I have to factor in."

How did the project get here?

Fallen originated several years ago when Burgess reconnected with his old EA mentor Scott Blackwood, the executive producer on the Skate series who had since retired. Blackwood fronted prototype funding and floated a venture-capital route to bypass publishers entirely, telling Burgess that "publishing is having some real challenges" — a prescient call from roughly three years ago. Blackwood died in 2023, and Burgess has carried the project since.

The game currently sits at what Burgess calls a pre-vertical slice stage: some systems polished, others still placeholder. He has considered crowdfunding but believes audience appetite for original IP has eroded after a decade of unfinished campaigns, leaving nostalgia-driven spinoffs dominant. A hybrid model, where a publisher matches community funds, remains on the table.

Crowdfunding, mentorship, AI-assisted production — Burgess has tried or considered nearly every lever. None has closed the gap between $1.5 million and a signed term sheet.

"I just want to make the damn game," he said.

The signal worth watching into 2026: whether Fallen's existing publisher conversations convert before year-end, or whether Burgess pivots to a hybrid crowdfunding structure. Either outcome will test whether the sub-$500,000 ceiling publishers are drawing in 2025 holds — and whether the AI-cost question becomes a standard line item in every indie term sheet that follows.