HAIL-MARY PASS

The first Citizen Sleeper was released straight onto Xbox Game Pass and has stayed there ever since; it’ll be joined by the sequel at launch. When we ask Gareth Damian Martin about the reasoning there, they point us straight to the game’s Xbox reviews: “They all say things like, ‘I don’t play these kinds of games, but I tried it because it was on Game Pass, and I loved it’, and that was massive for Citizen Sleeper.” To a studio of Jump Over The Age’s size, getting a deal with a console subscription service can be vital. “To be honest, I think Game Pass is keeping a lot of indie studios going right now,” Damian Martin says. “The money is a pittance to Microsoft, but to us it’s the thing that means we can make another videogame.”