Okay, so here’s the deal. A slice of the market is dying, but it’s dying out of sight. It’s that thing where you do not know what you will never see. So, today we’ve got to talk about a game that you are not going to play. I’m not going to play. It’s a game that was cancelled because, and I quote, it was conceived under very different market conditions when narrative-driven, story-rich games held stronger appeal. That is an alarming quote, and it’s the rationale given by 11bit Games. You’ll probably know them from frost punk. They make single player games. They make bloody good ones. It’s not just Frost Punk. It’s also This War of Mine, which was godamn outstanding. This isn’t some crazy bet failing. This is a staple developer that does not chase trends, that doesn’t put in their games, having to cancel a game, a game that appeals to their own strengths because they now feel the market won’t support it. So, with that alarm being raised, I think we should listen. I’ll begin with the cancellation. Project 8 was not some $200 million monument to hubris. It was not at all. Its late 24 cancellation led to the loss of about 11 million bucks and 18 jobs, which absolutely sucks. But it’s not some insane story of excesses. Now, by the end, only 37 people were working on that project. And by that point, it had existed in some form since 2018, but it had failed to meet some production milestones. And that is what led to 11bit cracking open their spreadsheet and having to make their uh well fairly grim determination. So they looked at everything they had with the game so far. How much money it would cost for them to actually finish the game. How much it would then cost to market that game. And when they looked at the market data, they saw that Project 8 quite simply would not make back the cost of finishing it. They say because of its genre and its offering. Essentially 11bit simply just looked at what other similar games had sold. And that’s multiple levels. There’s a part of me internally that is screaming that says if we only make things the success of which we can accurately pre-rationalize then we’ll make nothing creative. We won’t make new markets. We will just follow lagging indicators going nowhere finding ourselves stuck in local maximums. That’s totally what I do think. But the other part of this that makes it feel outrageous is that culturally everybody seems to say they love single player games that they miss single player narrative games. And over the past few years, it’s felt like we’ve actually got loads of those that people have loved. The good news is that 11bit have not left us hanging. They’ve spoken and they have shown us they’re working out. Here’s how we know more. So, Eurogamer spoke to the 11-bit CEO Sheislav Marshall and uh they basically talked about Project 8. This is probably what we learned. Project 8 was an experiment for the company where thematically it was in line with their work, but in some aspects it was pushing things a bit forward. It had a core theme of exploring grief in a third-p person action game set in a bright fantasy world. But this would be the group’s first console focused third person action game. And as we dive into things today, you’ll see that that is a type of game that a lot of us miss that um well does appear to have a problem. Now Eurogamer actually shown a demo of this game and they cited games like Prince of Persia, Rhyme, and Plague Tale as well as Hellblade as comparisons. Now, Plague Tale, I think, is the particularly like strong example here. It just seems that because there’s a focus in stealth gameplay, puzzles, enemy distraction, and that kind of thing. And Plague Tale is good to talk about because as a series, Plague Tale has done really well for Focus Entertainment. They’ve got 3 million players for the last game, just as one example. They’ve kept on making them, so it would have seemed that Plague Tale would kind of tell us, hey, the market can support that kind of game. But basically, whenever 11bit compared what they had last year to those games, they could not make it work. And here’s the direct quote. I’m not saying that there aren’t players for those games. There are, but the market is different. When you see what’s going on with the market and you see, okay, your costs are growing. That was the first moment when from our calculations we saw, okay, we want profit. It will be negative. It could be really risky for us. And that is me directly quoting a transcription of a man talking, but you can basically see that profit, cash flow are the main concerns there. And I don’t think he’s necessarily saying this in an extremely greedy way. Now it is the case that 11bit are publicly listed so they will have you know some other incentives but broadly speaking it seems it’s a risk thing because as he goes on to describe the last two years at 11 bit involved companywide delays amongst other issues and that meant that they simply could not take on the level of risk that a game of this type would have involved which basically is fair. It does look like Project 8 would have been betting far more than the 18 jobs that it claimed were they were to continue it that maybe it would have required a bit of uh you know the old boware magic to actually get a good game at the end. But for us there’s a clear learning here and it’s this learning that unlocks a deeper understanding and a better intuition of what actually does well in the market. So let me be clear the takeaway here should not be that companies are not willing to commission single player games. They clearly are doing that. Hell, even 11bit themselves just set a release date for The Altters, and they’ve got more to come that broadly are in that genre. But what this does suggest, and the thing for us to learn, is that those middle tier narrative titles that would perhaps represent a level up in terms of risk and budget and ambition, those are more risky than they used to be. And relative to the other sorts of games that could be made, those are the first things that will be cut. And with their scale, it’s clear that if anything goes wrong during development that could say inflate costs, it’s often easier to just walk away. And in a way that’s hard to hear following 2024 because 2024 was a hell of a year. Shadow of the Earth, Metaphor Refantasio, Like a Dragon, Infinite Wealth, all terrific games. We know that say both Blackmith, Wukong, and Dragons Dogma 2 sold really well. You’ve got indies like Animal Well and Crimson Diamond that kicked ass. And 2025, just to name one tiny little small game, had Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which was huge. So, how can it be in this world that 11bit are saying that the market is not responsive to single player games? Well, as it turns out, there’s an answer, and we found it within their portfolio. So, over the last 2 years, 11bit have published five games. There was the internally developed Frost Punk 2, and then the externally developed The Invincible, Indica, Creatures of Ava, and The Thma. And that last one’s really interesting to me. And to break those games down by genre, well, there’s a firsterson sci-fi thriller book adaptation, a first person horror narrative adventure, a third person creature collectathon platformer, and a dark isometric CRPG. They are all singleplayer games. And because 11bit are publicly listed, we can take a look in their annual report. And when we do, it turns out that The Invincible and Indica are the games that made a profit, but Creatures of Ava and the Thaturge have not made a profit yet. Now, the thing is, these are all games that are following some sort of strong thematic trend that does have proven sales. I mean, take the Thurge that released in the wake of Balders’s Gate 3. If you go to it in Steam right now, it’s there for, I think, $34.99. It’s got an 89% user rating. big old CRPG. I thought that’s what people loved and lapped up after Balders’s Gate. Uh Creatures of A, as an example, got a Game Pass deal, which certainly could have helped. And looking at these, you can see none of them are over stuffed, over ambitious projects. None of them have got like particularly scathing reviews even in Steam. Yet, the profitability rate at the time of that annual report was a mere 50%. That’s not to say 50% uh margin. I mean half of those have not yet turned a profit. And that’s why when we look at the successes of last year, the difference between these games is actually clear. And that’s why games like Project 8 end up being cancelled. That’s because games like Project 8 find themselves in the middle of the spectrum. They’re not quite like those big games that I talked about at the start. They’re not quite small enough to have just that indie level of d-risk because it’s not a crazy budget. No, the game that dies is the one that falls in the middle of those budgets. And the thing is, so many amazing inventive games that you would have called double A’s, well, they’re either crashing and burning whenever they release or they’re just not being made at all. That’s a whole category of games that we used to love that’s kind of just not a thing. Let’s tackle the market then. So 11bit are occupying a middle ground, right? Where they make perfectly solid seven out of 10 or eight out of 10 with original ideas. Sometimes that can be a hard sell. I mean, you’ve got games from Capcom or Atlas that are guaranteed to have like half a decade of resources be thrown into them, right? Especially all those important stages of like polish and, you know, marketing. You’ve got small indie darlings like say Animal Well that can be in development for 7 years and benefit from being comparatively cheap to make and as a game having a single thesis and then of course you add to that survivorship bias. I mean, indie game uh development, be it self-published or with a publisher, is basically like baby turtles hatching and, you know, will they make it to the sea? Who knows? They’re probably going to be eaten and die. So, there’s this middle ground, right? Where a game like Project 8 finds itself is absolutely horrible because on one side you have got the winners of the indie battle royale, right? 99 devs are dead, but one has succeeded, their game cost 10 quid to make, and it’s just earned a few million. Holy So you got that on one side and then on the other side what do you have? You’ve got manufactured success of the absolute pros with huge budgets. When you are in the middle in what we would traditionally call the double A space, it is hard to stand out. And this is something more and more people are talking about. I think the most notable one was well one we actually covered in a video. It was with Shawn Leaden who is an absolute legend of Sony and he described the collapse of the double A developer space and the budget basically the business model that allowed for double A to be a thing and that is sad that’s quite rough and it’s not just 11bit and one of their projects. No, as an example you’ve got Don Nod who are describing their continual struggle for profit. That’s even with new games like Banishers Ghost of New Eden and Jant. Basically profitability where is it? Oh You’ve got other examples like Embracer, right? Embracer group shuttered Pieces Interactive after the commercial failure of 2024’s Alone in the Dark. That was a double A and uh yeah, that studio is kind of dead and gone now. And from the point of view of uh the audience, it’s kind of all about the same question. Why would you buy these double A scale games when they cost the same as an indie or a AAA game that is on sale? They genuinely occupy a strange place in the market. With examples like that, you can see why 11bit looked at the market and thought, "Huh, With what this would cost, I just cannot see this adding up. I cannot see this being a risk that we can take." And that is a challenge. Because of course, if we only take, you know, risks that we can pre-rationalize a very, very high percentage chance of success, then guess what? we do not get sort of I hate to use this word but maybe this is one of the times where it’s okay but something that’s a bit blue ocean right a success that people don’t see coming that’s a genuine surprise either because it’s going to a totally unexplored part of the market or it’s just something that people wouldn’t have expected as an example one of the most recent commercial successes was Space Marine 2 Space Marine was made by Relic Entertainment a strategy game studio imagine right if Relic had never tried to make a single player action game of I guess like a double A plus uh sort of price tag in Space Marine. Imagine if they didn’t do that because their first attempt at doing that in a game called The Outfit didn’t happen to sell so well in 2006. Well, that would have probably been a safe financial bet. But guess what? We would not have Space Marine as a thing. And that’s where I get worried right now. It’s hard to imagine publishers and devs taking risks like this. And I don’t mean that for bad greedy reasons. No, I mean that genuinely for managing risk and being responsible. That’s just the state of the market that they’re dealing with. But the upshot of that is that a whole category of games is either failing on launch or is just not being made. And it’s historically one of the categories that used to bring us new IPs, new ideas, and a lot of things that I think many of us are sorely missing. Where are we left and what do we do? So, Project 8 was a game that did not have perfect development, but in a different market, it could have made it out there as a 7 out of 10, a 7 and a half out of 10, maybe done okay, and built out some skills that could have led to a game that’s really good, like say the Space Marine situation. But now, in this market, there is no room for error or experimentation. It’s quite simply not good business sense to take risks like that right now when it is so easy to go bust and the market is as tough as it is. And from the point of view of audiences, what that means is we get less new and interesting games of a certain budget level and above. So single player games are not going away. There will always be more for us to enjoy. But as this specific type and budget level of game fails to find audiences, well, guess what? We will see our options within that space shrink. We will see smaller games that could be brilliant. We will see not particularly risky but highly polished big budget games but just some of that maybe diamond in the rough middle ground where there will be a lot of trying a lot of striving to do something new that we’re not going to see as much. And it’s actually here towards the end that I personally disagree with a part of what we wrote. Okay, part of what we put together, the message that we’d intended for the end of this video was basically to say, look, whenever you see a game like this, actually, you know, recommend that to your friends, you know, leave a Steam review because if we don’t try to get the word out, well, we may not see games like this. And I do believe that. However, I think that by now things are so algorithmic that I don’t really know how much our individual efforts will really matter because what we’re dealing with here is not something where it can just be if we the players do some word of mouth these games will be more successful and then more of them will get published. No, there are deeper algorithmic reasons. Um, in one sense I mean the Steam algorithm. in another I mean the various attention algorithms that means X that means YouTube etc etc. Well, I actually think they and how the attention economy works are a huge part of why these games no longer have a space to fill. If you’re a big nerd about like an indie narrative game, well, you’ll go and play that. But I think so much attention is being eaten up and not being eaten up in a way that would move people, nudge people towards that sort of game that it’s kind of like people will turn up for the big popcorn movies, you know, the game equivalent of that or, you know, indie meme game they can play with friends that’s maybe like a good spooky horror game, which we’ve seen lots of. And then you’ll always have the connoisseurs who are willing to play just about everything, right? It’s a little bit like art movies. And maybe the movie analogy is an oddly good one here. You can see big blockbuster meme things put butts in seats and yeah, there’s people who do like watching art movies. They’ll keep on doing that. But it does feel like there’s a budget middle ground of movie. Something that led to a lot of the movies of the 80s and the ’90s that people absolutely loved. You could almost call them double A studio movies or single A studio movies. um that aren’t really happening as much anymore or perhaps when they do happen they just totally flop and they cannot get any cutth through in terms of marketing and audiences. I think that’s essentially what’s happening to games. The thing that we’re losing is kind of our equivalent of that mid-budget ’90s movie, which is really sad to me. So, um, let me know what you