Deliver Us Home Q&A – KeokeN Talks Studio Layoffs, Kickstarter Campaign, and Life as a Small Indie

Dutch independent developer KeokeN Interactive, founded by brothers Koen Deetman and Paul Deetman, is back on Kickstarter for Deliver Us Home. KeokeN had to let go of almost all its employees not long ago, and now it's just the two brothers again (plus a couple of collaborators), making the crowdfunding proposition a necessity.

I spoke with Koen Deetman at length about what that means for this third entry in the sci-fi franchise, how they're coping as a small indie team, and much more. As a reminder, the Kickstarter campaign is active for three more days, with KeokeN looking to raise another €12K to fund the project.

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The last time we spoke was ahead of the launch of the Deliver Us Mars. In our review, we called the sequel an improvement over the first one. But you had some issues in the studio, right? You also had to let go of most employees. What happened there? Was it an issue with low sales or was it something else?

We had a great development on Deliver Us Mars. It was absolutely a step up. I would like to think that that moment of crafting Deliver Us Mars was also very much part of our ambition in the studio. Besides trying to, of course, get into the same success rate as Deliver Us the Moon, we also tried to do new things and to show a little bit where our ambition was headed.

When we released in February 2023, which is when a lot of games were released, I don't think that the moment of release helped its performance. However, its sales were almost five times quicker than its predecessor. That was definitely not the problem. But when you saw the whole landscape of game publishing change every year, you saw that most of those deals relied on publishers recouping their budget. Once you understand what your landscape looks like, you cannot really sign anything else.

We were very open to our team and said that we had to fight for it in order to land a deal. But if the landscape