After splitting off from NetEase last year, T-Minus Zero Entertainment is leaning into a project financing model that it believes represents the most promising path forward — both for itself and for independent studios across the board.
T-Minus Zero’s new business model draws from independent production companies in the film industry, according to studio CEO Zachary Beaudoin.
“They do some initial development, they package that project and then they pitch it to other entities that have deeper pockets to fund it. They still drive the execution and the creativity of the project, but somebody else is financing or co-financing it, and then they have to go source a crew and cast that will do the work,” Beaudoin said in an interview with GamesBeat. “So, that’s how we’re looking at organizing ourselves. We’ve conceived of a couple of different game projects we’re pitching into for co-financing — and while we’re doing that, we’re moving one forward into production ourselves, and we’re still looking for co-financing on that.”
So far, T-Minus Zero’s fundraising conversations have been “interesting,” according to Beaudoin, who said part of the process had involved selling potential investors on the project financing model. Although the studio is actively hunting for backers, Beaudoin and his business partners Mark Tucker, Scott Stevens and Jef Dobson — who are all equal co-owners of the venture — are committed to moving forward with their vision in 2026.
“Investors’ appetite for risk — and this is all the different kinds of investors we talked to — is significantly lower, because as you’ve seen post-COVID, a lot of bets have fallen flat, and so a lot of investors are looking for smaller, lower-risk bets, or ways to reduce the risk on investment,” Beaudoin said. “And the conventional deals didn’t really allow for that. So we thought, well, in film, multiple parties invest at different stages, with different terms, to get the project realized to market, and people understand how that machine works. Can we borrow from that?”
The current state of T-Minus Zero Entertainment
Founded under the NetEase umbrella in 2023, T-Minus Zero went independent last year after NetEase decided to stop funding the studio.
Going from around 30 staffers to only 4 is a significant shift for T-Minus Zero Entertainment, which also handed over all of its pre-existing development projects to NetEase as part of last year’s split, although Beaudoin said NetEase offered the studio “generous terms” to purchase the rights to its name and other registered trademarks. Studio co-founder Rich Vogel is also staying on in an advisory capacity, although he is no longer leading the studio or employed there full-time.
“I’m looking for a job in this industry that’s ‘more stable’ — and I put that ‘more stable’ in quotes, because it’s all relative,” Vogel said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Both Vogel and Beaudoin made it clear that NetEase they did not feel NetEase had pulled the rug out from them last year, with Vogel pointing out that the parent company had given T-Minus Zero months of advance notice about its decision to stop funding the studio, and had gone to significant lengths to try to help T-Minus Zero secure new funding. The decision to pull T-Minus Zero’s funding was simply a result of a strategic shift at NetEase due to the retirement of Yingfeng Ding, the leader of NetEase’s Interactive Entertainment Group. (A NetEase representative did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
“Everyone saw the potential; that wasn’t it,” Vogel said. “But it’s an American team, and from a strategic point of view, they just felt like they wanted to invest in other things.”
Beaudoin was reticent on details about T-Minus Zero’s upcoming projects, but said the studio’s primary goal was to ship a game in the coming year — and that he and his partners had been paying close attention to the growing trend of friendslop.
“We’re super-veterans — we could make a really fun co-op game in this space or for this audience, and kind of knock those rough edges off,” Beaudoin said.
Moving forward, T-Minus Zero also plans to leverage artificial intelligence to fill in some of the gaps in its smaller team, although Beaudoin drew a hard line at using AI for anything player-facing, instead flagging its potential use to speed up research or administrative tasks.
“My personal philosophy on AI is, I would be willing to use AI in value-add capacities, provided that it multiplies the effectiveness of my team,” Beaudoin said. “So, if somebody invented a tool and said, ‘this could replace 10 animators,’ I would say, ‘well, I’ll keep my 10 animators and make them each 10x — and now it’s like having 100 animators.”