Gearbox Publishing

Profile updated May 2026

This profile is public because indielist links Gearbox Publishing to 5 published, evidence-backed indie games. That portfolio evidence does not classify the publisher itself as independent and is not an official statement from the publisher.

Gearbox Publishing is a game publisher with an evidence-backed indie game portfolio on indielist. indielist tracks 5 titles on its label, together holding 294,457 Steam reviews. Its biggest title by Steam reviews is Risk of Rain 2, with 238,509 reviews (2020). It has published games from 4 studios, including Hopoo Games, Norsfell, Compulsion Games and Casus Ludi. That averages about 58,891 Steam reviews per title across the label. For a developer deciding whether to pitch, the first thing to weigh is portfolio fit: which genres and what scale of project Gearbox Publishing has actually shipped and supported to launch, all of which indielist lays out on this page alongside its studio relationships and signing history. This profile sits inside indielist's relationship graph of studios, publishers, and games, so studios can judge fit before pitching and investors can trace the label's signing activity across genres and years, the kind of publisher to studio to game connections that are slow to reconstruct from storefront pages alone.

Gearbox Publishing's catalog on indielist spans 5 titles holding 294,457 Steam reviews in total, an average of about 59,000 per release, and its most-reviewed entries are Risk of Rain 2, Tribes of Midgard, Risk of Rain (2013), We Happy Few. For a developer weighing a pitch, that published track record is the clearest signal of what the label can actually take to market: which genres it has shipped, the review volume its releases tend to reach, and whether that scale is a realistic fit for the project on offer. Pitching a cozy puzzle game to a label whose catalog is all hardcore shooters is a fast rejection, and the portfolio makes that mismatch obvious before any email is sent. indielist shows the white-box sales estimate behind each of those titles too, so the publisher's commercial output can be judged on visible figures rather than on reputation or a press-release headline alone.

Gearbox Publishing has published work from 4 studios (Hopoo Games, Norsfell, Compulsion Games and Casus Ludi), and indielist records each pairing as an edge in its publisher-to-studio-to-game graph. An investor can use that to trace which developers a label has backed and how its roster has grown release by release, while a developer can check whether the publisher already works with teams of a similar size or genre before sending a pitch, which is a strong hint about whether a cold approach is worth the effort. Each linked studio page in turn lists that studio's full portfolio and its other publisher relationships, so the network around Gearbox Publishing can be explored outward in either direction rather than read as a flat, disconnected list, and the same graph powers the "similar publishers" suggestions that help a developer build a realistic shortlist instead of pitching one name at a time.

AI-readable version: /gearbox-publishing.md