After Abbey Games came to a halt for most of its employees by the end of 2019, three of them decided to start their own studio: Roost Games. On their first project Cat Cafe Manager, Rick Sorgdrager, Rutger Harder and Carmen van Sleeuwen did a lot of work in very little time. And by August 2020, after I had recovered enough to start working again, I joined the team to help bring the game to market.

In its first years, right up until the launch of Cat Cafe Manager, Roost Games was set up very loosely as a group of freelancers working together on a project. However, the idea was always to eventually formalize this team into a cooperative in which members share the costs and revenue evenly, based on the amount of effort each member puts into the project(s). And so, once Cat Cafe Manager became a success in 2022, we started making preparations and in early 2023 we were ready to make it official: the Roost Games cooperative was a fact.

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Since then, we’ve been working on multiple projects in addition to Cat Cafe Manager and we’ve been steadily expanding: the cooperative now has 6 members. While we’re still working on the extended documentation on our vision and strategy for the coming years, we have a few core principles we always adhere to:

• Health and durability - This should always take priority, for both the company itself and its workers.
• Effort over capital - It should always be more rewarding to work on a project than to invest capital in a project.
• Equal ownership and responsibility - Everyone working on a project has an equal vote, but also an equal responsibility to execute on that vote.

Currently, Roost Games is 6 people strong and working on making the company sustainable and as independent as possible while also facilitating work on our main project at the moment: Cat Cafe Manager 2