Garry Seto
Massive Damage Games
Garry Seto is the Co-CEO, Head of Studio, and Game Director at Massive Damage Games. With over 15 years of experience in the games industry, he has secured over $9M in funding and investments across more than a dozen shipped commercial games. He started his career in mobile apps and F2P games but is now focused on premium indie games for PC and console.
Garry has direct experience with game direction, design, production, funding, and publishing, including securing investments for games like Please Stay Calm, Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander, Star Renegades, Fera: The Sundered Tribes, and Massive Damage's Unannounced Game 9.
Garry is passionate about supporting the game development community by coaching ambitious founders in project fundraising, game direction, design, and production.
When he's not making games, running a game studio, or coaching founders, Garry enjoys moonlighting as an electronic music DJ, a certified Yoga teacher, and a father to two young rambunctious boys.
Garry Seto is speaking at the following session/s
Fera: The Sundered Launch - Lessons Learned Self-Publishing a AA Game in Early Access in 2024
From 2021 to 2024, our team at Massive Damage decided to take a giant leap - from making smaller indie titles to a self-published AA game - with Fera: The Sundered Tribes. It was a story of "firsts" as we switched from Unity to Unreal Engine 5, dove into multiplayer, tackled making a 3rd-person open-world action game, and doubled our staff, all in one go.
Spoiler alert: It didn’t go exactly as planned. But we learned a hell of a lot along the way.
This talk pulls no punches about the hard lessons we learned by biting off more than we could chew. I’ll walk through how a dream project spiraled into unchecked scope creep, ballooning costs, and a scramble to publish too soon. We’ll talk about marketing misfires that set expectations sky-high and targeted the wrong audience, pricing errors that turned off potential early adopters, the challenges of self-publishing, how Early Access expectations have changed, and the funding nightmares that nearly shut us down - twice.
I’ll also share how we tried to claw our way back once everything started to unravel. From revisiting our price point to overhauling onboarding, addressing core quality-of-life issues, and learning the power of transparency, we made every possible effort to salvage both the game and our studio's reputation.
For indie studios aiming to move up to AA or even in ambition, this honest, raw, behind the scenes post-mortem on Fera: The Sundered Tribes production and launch will show you how to recognize and avoid the pitfalls we stumbled into… and how to recover if you’ve already fallen in.
Session Takeaway
- How to set realistic scope boundaries and avoid overcommitting to new technologies, genres, and features all at once
- Key marketing and pricing pitfalls, drawn from firsthand experience targeting the wrong audience and overcharging in Early Access
- Practical strategies for self-publishing, including cost-effective ways to handle QA, PR, and localization
- Tips for managing “multiple firsts”—from switching engines to doubling team size—and building enough learning time into your schedule
- Actionable methods to secure backup funding, bridge financing, and investor support so your studio can stay afloat when unexpected setbacks arise
Session speakers
