Indie publisher opens new division to avoid "spending large sums of money on external development"; will build on established relationships with local universities<\/p>\n
Indie publisher Secret Mode has set up a new internal development studio in Sheffield to support the label's line-up of games, starting with recent hit Escape the Backrooms and Chained Together, which Secret Mode acquired in June. At launch the venture is just three people strong, but over the next twelve months it's planned to expand to around 20 people.<\/p>\n
The Sheffield office came about following the arrival of Dan Secker as VP of technology and operations in November 2025. He "really quickly" identified the need for an internal studio.<\/p>\n
"We're spending large sums of money on external development teams," he explains. "My whole career is 28 years in development \u2013 we asked why we weren't building our own team to support our own portfolio of products, creating our own dedicated pipelines to update content." The Sheffield team is the answer, and will initially be supporting Escape the Backrooms and Chained Together with the goal of "keeping retention high" while also "bringing along new players for the journey".<\/p>\n
"Both are products that we acquired that are doing really great numbers," Secker says. "They're driven by the community, and players are screaming out for more content, more levels. The development arm is going to start with building additional content, whether that be new levels, or something along the lines of the cosmetic system, or just porting that to different platforms as well. Chained Together is only available on Steam, but we're absolutely going to be looking at other platforms, such as Xbox, PS5, maybe Switch 2 as well."<\/p>\n
Part of the pitch to potential staff is that their work will be available quickly; Secker says there are a lot of people out there who don't want to "spend their time on five-year AAA projects".<\/p>\n
"People want to be building things that will be straight into the hands of the community," he says. "This is a great opportunity to build a studio, build a development arm for Secret Mode, and actually allow people to make content that people can get their hands on almost instantly. That's the main intention behind those two existing titles. Once we prove it out, we'll look at further titles, and hopefully our portfolio will expand, and that will extend the development arm as well."<\/p>\n
Jake Habgood, technical development director, adds: "As a game developer, these days you can spend a huge amount of your career working on something that just never sees the light of day. The opportunity to come into a project that's already got a huge audience and actually make a difference right away is really exciting."<\/p>\n
Internal development support is a valuable addition to Secret Mode's services in an increasingly competitive and saturated indie and mid-tier publishing space.<\/p>\n
"That's part of why we've looked at this," Secker confirms. "It's a long-term commitment for this dedicated internal team. We have titles that just keep going, and we'll see communities running games for years. We want to do this, and we want to do it with our own development team."<\/p>\n
The goal is not, however, for the studio to develop its own titles \u2013 the trajectory followed by Secret Mode's original parent Sumo Digital, until it refocused on co-dev after being acquired by Tencent \u2013 or at least, not yet. "I'm not going to say that's not going to happen," says Secker of developing new IP, "because you can never tell how these things will pan out\u2026 maybe further down the line, once we prove this is successful. But that's certainly not the intention. That's not what we're building."<\/p>\n
There's also an element of coming full circle for Secret Mode to set up a studio in Sheffield, as Sumo Digital remains headquartered in the city. Secret Mode itself is based in Leamington Spa, but Sheffield "just made sense" for the studio. "There's such a dynamic pool of talent," Secker says. "And Jake's links with the university are massive."<\/p>\n
In addition to a CV that boasts stints at Gremlin Interactive and Sumo, Habgood has had an equally impressive career in education. He has lectured at the University of Sheffield, University of Nottingham and Sheffield Hallam, where he was also the director of that institution's Steel Minions game studio. His role heading up education partnerships for Sumo involved working with the studio's Academy, which recently released deckbuilding football management title Nutmeg. He says that Secret Mode Sheffield wants to retain strong links to the universities in Sheffield.<\/p>\n
"We very much intend to maintain those links and have a real-world presence where we could be found, we could be talked to, we can help mentor new people coming into our industry," Habgood says. "I think one of the things we learned going through the process with Nutmeg was that junior teams can be extraordinarily passionate. They have a lot to offer, a lot to give, and they have none of the cynicism of older developers. It's one of the reasons we as a team love working with young people. They haven't got that, and they've just got so much energy and enthusiasm, and we want to bring that to these products."<\/p>\n
In keeping with a recent drift by some businesses back towards in-person working, staff at Secret Mode Sheffield is that staff will be required to be in the office four days a week. This, Secker explains, is because sharing a physical space makes solving problems easier.<\/p>\n