A team of industry veterans behind Minecraft, Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic have launched the indie publisher Three Friends.
It’s a small team, but they’ve been here before and it’s like they’re going full circle back to the days when their big company was a small company.
The Stockholm, Sweden-based indie publisher focuses on partnering with small Nordic teams, particularly in Sweden. The name is a bit obsolete already as it has actually been cofounded by four people: Albert Säfström, Daniel Kaplan, Sebastian Badylak and Johan Hermeren, Three Friends help developers refine their vision and core mechanics, ensuring their game is both creatively strong and commercially viable.
Going small
With a small team, the company can spend more time on each project. Rather than pray and spray, the team is trying to make each project into a success.
“We’re hoping that our hit rate will be higher than someone with a portfolio strategy,” Säfström said. “We are a lot more picky.”
“There’s no secret trick to making a great game—it’s not about one big idea, but about addressing thousands of small questions along the way,” said Säfström, cofounder and producer at Three Friends, in a statement. “The right choices at the right time add up, shaping the final experience. We work closely with developers to create an environment where ideas can mature without drifting off course, helping teams focus their efforts and make the most of their time and resources.”
Three Friends isn’t about signing as many games as possible—it’s about making each one count. By working closely with a select few teams, they ensure every project gets hands-on support, long-term investment, and the strategic guidance needed to succeed. Partnering early, they help developers refine ideas, sharpen mechanics, and create something truly special.
As for the difficulties that Matthew Ball pointed out in his slide deck, Säfström said, “I think the industry as a whole overextended during Covid. And we’re still seeing the consequences of that. People assumed all of the growth curves would continue to extend upward and to the right, as they did during Covid. We’re seeing the aftermath of that right now.”
“It feels like we have gone back to the time before Covid,” Kaplan said.
Säfström said, “It’s not a surprise that the games that have been succeeding are excellent experiences. For us, with the situation we are in, it allows us to spend more time on each project. It’s about trying not to care about the weekly trends in the market. A good game shouldn’t care about the underling trends. A good game should survive in any market.”
“It’s easier for us because we are financing smaller developers and we can sustain small teams for a long time,” Kaplan said.
“Publishing is always more attractive since we believe we can contribute a lot in terms of the game production side of things,” Kaplan said. “One of the reasons why we quit our other jobs was because we ended up becoming a bigger company. We were just watching when everyone else was doing cool stuff. We wanted to get more involved in the into the making of the cool stuff. And it’s harder to be so direct and so involved when you’re at the big company. It feels like we have gone back five or six years and tried to build tiny Coffee Stain again.”
Publishing model
Three Friends’ publishing model is built on three key principles:
- Get in Early, Build it Right – The best games start with a strong foundation. Three Friends partner with developers early to refine their vision and set them up for success.
- Pick the Right Battles – Indie teams don’t have the resources of triple-A studios. Three Friends help them focus on what truly makes their game stand out—like choosing the essential survival items for a deserted island.
- Guidance, Not Control – Great games need creative vision. Three Friends work closely with developers, playtesting alongside them and providing insights—without taking the reins.
“We don’t believe in rushing a game to market or throwing money at problems,” said Kaplan, cofounder and Producer at Three Friends, in a statement. “Some of the best indie games–like Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic–took the time to refine their core gameplay before scaling up. That’s why we partner with developers early, helping them figure out what makes their game special so they can double down on what works.”
With decades of experience supporting indie studios, Three Friends understands the challenges of bringing an independent game to market. Their hands-on approach, combined with a deep understanding of the indie landscape, ensures that developers not only receive funding but also the strategic support needed to navigate the complex path from concept to release.
Three Friends will begin revealing its first signed titles in spring 2025. For more information, you can follow Three Friends on LinkedIn or visit the official website here.
The company has signed with six small teams so far, five in Sweden and one in the U.S. The hope is to launch and reveal the first title this year.
Origins
Three Friends is a boutique indie publisher founded by industry veterans behind Minecraft, Valheim, and Deep Rock Galactic. Based in Sweden, they focus on helping primarily Swedish and Nordic developers turn strong ideas into standout games by providing hands-on guidance, financial backing, and a gameplay-first approach to publishing.
By partnering with teams early in development, Three Friends ensures they have the time, resources, and support needed to bring their vision to life.
“We’re small in the publisher based in Sweden. And we’re actually, we’re actually four people who are running this Three Friends venture,” Säfström said. “I used to run Coffee Stain Publishing, and we started Coffee Stain Publishing in 2016 until the end of 2022 when we when we started Three Friends.”
Kaplan works as producer and business developer. He was formerly the CEO of Keepsake Games and was also at Coffee Stain at the start. He left in 2021 and started Keepsake Games, a small indie game company in Stockholm.
Badylak was also at Coffee Stain from the beginning and left just before the team started Three Friends. The company has a private investor but it is not yet disclosing who that is.
“We believe that with our background, there is room to focus on these smaller projects where we could be very picky about the projects that we take on and then work a lot closer with the projects than many other publishers,” Säfström said.
He said the team doesn’t necessarily believe it’s sitting on a big insight. Rather, they know that making a good game takes a lot of time and effort.
“We want to give our teams the ability to explore or cook their game, to make something really special,” Säfström said. “It’s also not about one person coming with this one silver bullet idea that takes a project from good to great. It’s about the accumulation of making pretty good decisions consistently over time. You know the really boring answer is you should get eight hours of sleep, drink lots of water, eat your vegetables and go for a walk. That kind of mentality to making games — and to us, that means that we’re heavily involved — and we help our teams explore the vision of the games that they’re trying to make.”
Badylak added, “It’s super important to us that it’s still them making their own games, but we act as checks and balances and and someone to bounce ideas off to see that we can find the best version of of the game that they want to make.”
The company will focus on the Swedish and great Nordic markets in terms of teams. But if it finds a great game, it will work with that team regardless of where it is. The founders have historically had a lot of success in Steam Early Access, and they know the Steam platform well.
“So we’re focusing on on games that would thrive in that Steam Early Access market,” Badylak said. “So we’re not focused on consoles or mobile or blockchain or etc, any of that space.”
Säfström said the company may release its games on the consoles too, but the PC is the primary target. It’s less likely to be working on mobile games.
Chasing trends? Nope.
The team isn’t categorically opposed to blockchain, but they are focused on gameplay first and they haven’t seen any pitches so far where blockchain is a vital component.
“Most of the times it feels like it’s someone chasing a trend. That’s not something we’ve done. We have not seen any features where blockchain has been integrated in a way where it enhances the game,” Kaplan said.
Säfström added, “We have seen nothing there that excites us in blockchain.”
AI game development?
As for AI-powered games, Kaplan said the team is hesitant. A superstar developer may get better with AI tools. But a mediocre developer might not benefit so much. If tools become good at enhancing productivity, it makes the small team better and even more picky. But it’s still early days in AI tools making a difference in productivity, Säfström said.
“There’s a lot of people in the industry who are scared about the jobs being taken away,” Kaplan said. “We’re in a position where people can try out these different models and find mistakes. We work with really small teams and we pride ourselves on being quite scrappy. If we can find a really good tool that can help us, where it’s for the betterment of the game, we believe that at the end of the day, it’s about what the players experience when they play the game that’s going to make the difference. It’s not something that we’re doing for the sake of doing it.”
“We’re quite pragmatic in that sense. Whatever improves the player experience — that’s something we will definitely evaluate,” Säfström said. “We come from a PC background.”
“We’re also trying to look ahead. We see these really powerful engines, for instance, being able to render photorealistic scenes. Imagine being able to do this with a with a really small team,” Säfström said. “But the me today is like thinking two or three years ahead, thinking that like this will just raise the bar, and so like being a nice looking game will not be that big of a differentiating factor in a year or two. And so we believe that the core gameplay being strong is even more important.”
On the question of AI, Säfström said smaller teams will be able to use it very inexpensively to explore a lot of concepts with agility.
“That’s such a like an advantage that we have because. If you know the meme, if you have a symphony orchestra and one person can play this piece by Mozart in three minutes. How long does it take foe a symphony orchestra? Well, it takes the same amount of time. If you have a really big team, it becomes so prohibitively expensive to do this exploration. So you kind of default back to what’s proven and our size allows us to explore a lot more and hopefully find some interesting new ground.”
