a photo of a frosted glass office door. On the door a sign reads, "Kieffer Bros. Game Studio"

Cryogenic Sleep Mode

a glass wall plasted with concept art sketches
Concept Art Wall from 2011

It has been nearly eight years of making games, and we’ve reached a crossroad. Our search for a sustainable and ethical business model as an indie game studio had it’s up and downs, but never fully blossomed into long-term sustainability.

Making indie games—really any kind of independent creative venture—is hard. Making money from them is harder. Making a decent living is even harder. Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about the sacrifices that are required to keep our business going, but more importantly, if we were willing to continue making these sacrifices (We’ll try to write more about this in the future).

After months—years really—of contemplating this question, we’ve made a decision to take a step back and stop working on our game studio full time.

We don’t, however, see this as the end of the road. We’d love to keep making games, but for now it has to be a hobby, not what we rely on to feed our families.

a screenshot from the word game, Spell Rift, showing a map with purple mountains floating above a starry sky
Spell Rift - 2011

So, what we are doing is putting our game studio into a sort of cryogenic stasis. You’ll still be able to buy our games, but we won’t be working on anything new. At least full time anyways.

While brain games are super important, there are countless other worthwhile things we’d love to work on that address issues of greater gravity (and projects that not only involve being able to pay rent, but perhaps could consistently afford us health insurance too).

a screenshot from the puzzle game, Blockwick 2, showing an array of purple, blue, and white blocks of varying sizes strewn around the area.
Blockwick 2 - 2014

We are endlessly grateful to everyone who has played our games and made it possible for us to work for all these years. Thank you forever. We hope to one day cook up more brain food for all of you and the hungry masses.

World Peace,

Kieffer Bros.

a screenshot from the puzzle game, Aqueduct, showing a group of pipe blocks starting to create a path from a faucet to a drain, but not fully complete.
Aqueduct - 2010

P.S. If you know of the existence of any mobile game publishers who are interested in premium puzzle games, let us know. We still have a bunch of awesome game projects on the back-burner that we’d love to work on full-time.

P.P.S. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay posted on any new game projects we may release.