Starbreeze Studios

4 min readFeb 11, 2022

Starbreeze Studios AB is a Swedish video game developer and publisher based in Stockholm. Notable games developed include The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Payday 2 and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Founded by members of the demogroup Triton, the company was merged with O3 Games in 2002 wherein the Starbreeze name was retained. The company produced titles including Enclave and Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade. In the early 2000s, cancellations of their projects due to conflicts with publishers and a failed acquisition led to a severe financial crisis, resulting in staff lay-offs during the development of Starbreeze’s fourth game, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. This game received critical acclaim and helped Starbreeze establish a reputation for producing a good licensed game. The company worked on The Darkness, whose sales were considered satisfactory.

Starbreeze partnered with Electronic Arts to develop a reboot to the Syndicate series, but it ended up being a commercial failure, and many staff members moved to rival company MachineGames, established by Starbreeze’s founders. As a result, the company shifted part of its focus to developing smaller games, such as Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Starbreeze began expanding the company in 2012 with its acquisition of Overkill Software. Overkill’s first title after the acquisition, Payday 2, helped Starbreeze make a record profit after suffering an accumulated loss of $14.4 million since its inception. In 2015, the company announced that it would start publishing video games from independent developers and that it had begun development of a virtual reality headset named Project Star VR.

Starbreeze had acquired a license to develop Overkill’s The Walking Dead from Skybound Entertainment, but the project fell into development hell and once released in 2018, was poorly reviewed and had poor sales; the title was ultimately pulled and Skybound revoked Starbreeze’s license. Having expected a financial boon from this game, Starbreeze spent a year in restructuring from December 2018 to December 2019 to regain financial footing, but had to sell off many of its publishing deals and other steps to be able to move forward.

History[edit]

Founding and merger (1998–2002)[edit]

Starbreeze Studios was founded by Swedish programmer Magnus Högdahl. Högdahl was a former member of the PC demoscene group Triton,[3] and specialized in making tech demos. He decided to form Starbreeze after his project, an action role-playing game named Into the Shadows, was canceled.[4] He then decided to found his own studio and began crafting his own game engine.[3] He actively recruited staff among his acquaintances and the studio was established in 1998 in Härnösand, Sweden.[5]

Högdahl serving as the company’s head and tech lead, was responsible for creating a new game engine for future games, and looking for publishers willing to help publish its games.[3] At that time, the company had only about five employees,[3] and had created a prototype for a video game and pitched it to publishers at E3 1998.[4] Gremlin Interactive agreed to publish the game, and the deal was finalized in late 1998. The company grew to have roughly eleven staff members. The game was a first-person action role-playing game named Sorcery. With a high fantasy setting, the game featured 3D visuals and its gameplay was similar to that of Diablo and Quake.[4] However, Gremlin Interactive was acquired by Infogrames in 2000 and the partnership with Starbreeze dissolved, resulting in the game’s cancellation.[6]

O3 Games was founded by Lars Johansson, who also was active in the demoscene. Its first game was The Outforce, a real-time strategy space game that was released in 2000 and subsequently became a success for the company. O3 needed to expand so that it could continue video game development.[7] After Sorcery’s cancellation, Starbreeze ran into financial difficulties. Unable to support itself financially, Starbreeze needed to merge with another developer to continue in business.[3] The two companies discussed a merger in Uppsala and merged shortly afterwards, retaining the name Starbreeze Studios.[7]

Post-merger (2002–2009)[edit]

After the merger, the company began working on Enclave, a medieval fantasy, multiplayer-only video game inspired by Team Fortress. The game also became the company’s first project with international appeal, enabling Starbreeze to partner with various publishers including Swing Entertainment, Conspiracy Entertainment, and Vivendi.[7] However, Swing Entertainment faced bankruptcy at that time, and decided to turn the game into a single-player action-adventure video game with the goal of sending it to market as soon as possible.[3] The game was released in 2002, and Starbreeze had to lay off staff after its release.[6] Enclave II was also in development. The sequel was said to feature a more elaborate story, 28 different maps, 10 playable characters, and an improved fighting system.[8] However, these features were axed when Starbreeze got into legal troubles with the publisher, resulting in the game’s cancellation.[3] Another game, Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade, was successfully released with help from publisher TDK Mediactive. However its sequel was shifted to another developer.[3] Starbreeze attempted to acquire another studio, Rock Solid Games, but the agreement between the two fell apart and brought both companies financial problems.[6]

Starbreeze Studios

Contents

History[edit]

Founding and merger (1998–2002)[edit]

Post-merger (2002–2009)[edit]

Written by Patidoj