The Amir Rao and Supergiant Games Founder Story

Most gamers had never heard of Supergiant Games before Hades started sweeping award shows. The studio was founded in 2009 by two former Electronic Arts employees in a San Jose living room and shipped Hades as its fourth title in September 2020. During two years of early access, the game sold 700,000 copies. Within days of its official release it crossed one million total and went on to win Game of the Year at multiple major industry awards.

The Amir Rao founder story begins at EA, where he and Gavin Simon left stable jobs to build something smaller. They started with seven people and have grown to about twenty across five games. The studio has never taken outside funding or answered to a publisher’s deadline. It makes one game at a time, owns everything it builds, and still counts every original member of that seven-person Bastion team among its staff today.

In an industry where studios expand, churn, and burn out, Supergiant has stayed deliberately small, stayed self-funded, and produced one of the most celebrated games of the past decade anyway. Hades II took the same approach.

This is not the usual startup growth story. It’s about what a company can build by refusing to scale, refusing outside money, and refusing the urgency that comes with either. For founders watching roadmaps stretch toward headcount targets and funding rounds, Supergiant raises a fair question: what does deliberate smallness actually make possible?

The Amir Rao Founder Story From Electronic Arts to Bastion

Supergiant’s history starts inside one of the biggest publishers in the business. Amir Rao and Gavin Simon both worked on the Command & Conquer series at EA Los Angeles. Rao handled business development and studio operations, and Simon focused on programming and engineering. They left in 2009 and started Supergiant Games out of Rao’s family home in San Jose, swapping a major studio for a living room and a laptop.

That living room became the starting point for Bastion. Greg Kasavin, a former games journalist who had reviewed games before making them, joined shortly after founding as writer and designer. He later became creative director, and his narrative instincts shaped the studio’s identity from the start. Two creative leads defined Supergiant’s sound and look from the beginning: art director Jen Zee and composer Darren Korb.

Bastion, the studio’s debut, took about two years to develop starting in September 2009. A team of seven built it, funded entirely out of pocket with no publisher advance or external investment. The game surpassed 3 million units sold by early 2015, according to Wikipedia and indiegame.com.

The craft behind that success was intensely personal. Zee hand-created nearly every Bastion asset, drawing the game’s floating, hand-painted world piece by piece. Korb scored the title and has gone on to score every Supergiant game since, performing, recording, producing, and mixing almost every Hades track by himself. That blend of a small team and individual talent became the studio’s working model, and it carried into the games that followed.

Why Staying Small Is Supergiant’s Moat

Supergiant’s motto, reported by gamespublisher.com, is “Small team, big vision,” and the studio has not quietly outgrown it. The cap of around 20 to 25 people is deliberate, and the founders treat it as an advantage rather than a restriction. In an industry where growth is usually the whole point, that commitment to a small game studio success model stands out.

The game-specific team sizes tell the story better than any mission statement. Each title has scaled up only as far as its scope required, and no further.

Those are deliberate step-ups tied to project scope, not arbitrary headcount targets. Pyre, for instance, was developed by a core staff of 12 despite a larger scope than anything the studio had attempted before. Hades grew to roughly 20 as the game’s systems and narrative ambitions demanded more hands.

The headcount reports after Hades vary depending on who is counting and when:

• 16 employees as of December 2020, per Medium

• About 25 employees as of 2025, per indiegame.com

• About 30 full-time members, per a DICE Europe speaker profile

• 42 employees as of June 2026, per Tracxn

The studio itself consistently describes the team as “a few dozen people.” That phrasing matters. It shows a company that doesn’t measure itself by payroll size, even as the numbers drift upward. It also keeps the studio’s commitment to staying small intact even as its reputation grows.

That ethos is reinforced by how Supergiant is financed. Per Tracxn, the studio has stayed independent and unfunded, building one game at a time across Transistor, Pyre, and Hades without outside investment. That structure removes the pressure to scale headcount for parallel projects or satisfy investors expecting rapid growth. There are no simultaneous productions, no multiplayer teams spun up to chase live-service revenue, and no reason to staff up beyond what the current game actually needs. The small team isn’t a constraint the studio works around. It’s what keeps every project focused, funded, and finished on the studio’s own terms.

How Supergiant Stays Self-Funded Without Publishers or Venture Capital

Supergiant’s self-funded model underpins everything else. Amir Rao and Gavin Simon started the studio with their own money and deliberately avoided venture capital and publisher advances to keep control. That decision, repeated in multiple founder interviews and profiles, came from wanting to avoid the creative constraints and pressures of large publishers, according to grokipedia. Self-funding let the team maintain full control over every game’s vision.

That control shows up most clearly in how long the studio takes to ship. Without outside deadlines, each game moves at its own pace.

Those timelines reflect the studio’s independence. A publisher funding Bastion would likely have demanded a faster turnaround, but the team spent two years on its debut. Transistor took a year longer. Hades stretched its development across early access, letting players shape the game for about two years before full release.

Because Supergiant owns its IP outright, it could also make distribution decisions that a publisher might have overruled. The studio chose the Epic Games Store as a timed exclusive for Hades’ early access, a decision made in conversation with Epic rather than forced by a publishing deal. That flexibility, the ability to pick partners and platforms on its own terms, is exactly what self-funding buys. Self-funding keeps the money, but it also keeps every decision that comes with it.

Hades Early Access Strategy: How Player Feedback Shaped the Game

Hades’ early access strategy was announced with some fanfare. Supergiant revealed the game at The Game Awards on December 6, 2018, as one of the first third-party titles on the newly announced Epic Games Store. The studio had spoken with Epic directly and felt the experimental platform matched what Hades was trying to do.

The early access decision came only after the game’s foundation was in place. Supergiant spent months building the core loop, the combat, and the narrative framework before inviting players in. As a roughly 20-person team, the studio could support early access on only one platform at first, so the initial release stayed exclusive while the team continued polishing. The Steam release followed on December 10, 2019, about a year into early access.

The process stood out because Supergiant treated it openly. Player feedback during early access directly shaped the story, the balance of weapons and boons, and even the game’s ‘True Ending’ before the 1.0 launch. Greg Kasavin put it plainly in an interview with Eurogamer: “We designed Hades for Early Access, believing you could help us make a better game.” That wasn’t a marketing line. It described how the studio actually worked, adjusting difficulty, refining narrative beats, and tuning systems based on what players reported back.

The engine rebuild beneath all of this was just as important. Supergiant’s custom game engine had been written in C# using the Microsoft XNA framework since Bastion, but during Hades development the studio rewrote it in C++ based on The Forge framework. The goal was better performance and cross-platform support. The payoff came later. The engine rewrite enabled the console and mobile ports that followed the PC release.

For founders outside the games industry, this is the most transferable part of the Supergiant story. The studio didn’t treat early access as a pre-order scheme or a marketing stunt. It treated players as collaborators, shipped an unfinished product on purpose, and let the audience improve it. Any founder shipping a product to market can take a similar approach. Build a solid foundation first, release to a limited audience on purpose, listen to what comes back, and let users help finish it.

Hades Success Story: Awards, Sales, and the Hades II Early Access Legacy

Hades’ success shows up in both awards and sales. The game took Game of the Year at the 2021 BAFTA Games Awards, the DICE Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards, the New York Game Awards, and the inaugural Gayming Awards. It also won Best Indie Game and Best Action Game at The Game Awards 2020, a complete sweep for a game that spent two years in early access before its official release.

The commercial numbers behind those awards are just as striking, though exact figures depend on which tracker is doing the counting:

• On Steam, Hades holds a 98% Overwhelmingly Positive review score and an all-time peak of 54,240 concurrent players, a high figure for a single-player roguelike.

• It currently sells for $24.99 on Steam, with an average discounted price of $20.92 over the past six months, so it has held its value without aggressive markdowns.

Sales estimates vary more widely across sources:

The gap between trackers reflects different methodologies, but even the conservative end of the range is a strong outcome for a self-funded studio of roughly twenty people. Hades also expanded beyond PC, arriving on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in August 2021, and on iOS in March 2024 through Netflix Games.

Hades II carried the same early access philosophy forward. Greg Kasavin said the sequel was designed for early access “from the ground up,” with listening to and responding to player feedback at the center of development. A notable moment came after launch: a post-launch patch changed the game’s “true” ending in response to player feedback, not as part of the original plan. Amir Rao put it plainly, saying player feedback “allowed the original Hades game and Hades 2 to be what it is.”

The trust built during Hades’ early access period has real commercial weight. Players who saw their feedback shape the original were willing to spend $30 on Hades II while it was still unfinished, a vote of confidence that most studios couldn’t count on. Supergiant remains focused on supporting Hades II after its 1.0 release, and the studio has said a Hades 3 is “not preordained.” Given how the first two games turned out, the next project, whatever it is, will likely arrive on the same terms: small team, self-funded, player-shaped, and ready when it’s ready.