Kalari Interactive are four people in Coimbatore with two shipped games and no investor. They publish their annual sales numbers, which almost nobody at their size does. I asked why.
"Because when we started we could not plan," they told me. "Everybody ahead of us treated their numbers as a secret, so we had no idea whether four thousand copies was a disaster or a normal first game. We spent a year assuming we had failed. We had not. We just had nothing to compare against."
The numbers, for the record: Kalari Ascent sold 31,000 copies across PC and Switch over two years, with 61 percent of revenue coming after the first month, which is unusual and which they attribute to a Switch port that arrived eight months late and turned out to be well timed by accident. Static Bloom sold 4,100 in its first year, which they describe as "a disappointment we are being honest about".
What is striking is how the two games funded each other. Kalari Ascent paid for Static Bloom, Static Bloom has not yet paid for the next one, and the gap is covered by contract work they take deliberately rather than reluctantly. "The contract work is not a failure state," they said. "It is the thing that means we never have to take a deal we would resent."