‘I don’t see the point of me without the politics’: video game writer Meghna Jayanth on the benefits of staying indie

After a less happy time attached to triple-A games, Jayanth has settled on smaller, freer developers – and is using that freedom to speak up for causes bigger companies would rather ignore

Can a video game writer do her best work at the industry’s biggest scale? Well: Meghna Jayanth is fine where she is. Last year, with Outerloop Games, she released Thirsty Suitors, a fluorescent fusion of messy flirting and sick skating; coming up next is All Rise, a climate action courtroom drama. These are indie games – Thirsty Suitors’ hero is a queer Desi skater and the villain is her feelings; of course it is an indie game – and Jayanth, one of the star video game writers of her generation, is perfectly at home here, where a modest budget is the trade-off for making joyful games about colonialism, identity and sexuality, with people whose values align with hers.

The money is smaller, and that hurts getting the work noticed. “It was tough to come out when we did,” Jayanth says of Thirsty Suitors. “People were still playing Baldur’s Gate III, because it’s huge. The average gamer on Steam plays four games a year. That’s the real problem for most indie studios: how do you reach people without millions and a marketing budget?”