Frictional Games

Profile updated May 2026

This profile is public because indielist links Frictional Games to 6 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.

Frictional Games is a game publisher with an evidence-backed indie game portfolio on indielist. indielist tracks 6 titles on its label, together holding 116,328 Steam reviews. Its biggest title by Steam reviews is SOMA, with 52,031 reviews (2015). It has published games from 2 studios, including Frictional Games and The Chinese Room. That averages about 19,388 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 Frictional Games 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.

Frictional Games's catalog on indielist spans 6 titles holding 116,328 Steam reviews in total, an average of about 19,000 per release, and its most-reviewed entries are SOMA, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Amnesia: The Bunker, Amnesia: Rebirth. 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.

Frictional Games has published work from 2 studios (Frictional Games and The Chinese Room), 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 Frictional Games 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: /frictional-games.md