There’s also the patience question. Building IP you believe in
means resisting pressure to pivot toward whatever is trending, or to ship before you’re ready. That’s a choice you have to keep making actively, not just once.
technical expertise: optimisation and platform-specific development. We’ve contributed to titles like It Takes Two, the Arkham Trilogy, Assetto Corsa Competizione, Split Fiction, High on Life. We can’t go into specifics about our contribution to each project, but the throughline is consistent: on the porting side, we bring deep technical knowledge to games that need to perform well across platforms; on the co-dev side, we take on the technical challenges that would otherwise weigh on the original team, so they can stay focused on what they do best, which is making a great game.
How do you balance client work with you own internal development? The honest answer is that it took time to get it right. What I want to be clear about is that client projects are never affected by our internal work. We take real pride in what we do, and we treat every client project as if it were our own. It is never just a way to pay the bills. Structurally, City 20 always has a core team, but the size of that
team flexes depending on the phase we’re in. Development is modular, so milestones and deliverables can be rearranged when team composition changes. That flexibility is what makes both tracks sustainable without one compromising the other.
What are the ‘perils’ of building original IP in today’s market? Visibility is the obvious one. The market is crowded and attention is expensive. But for us, the subtler challenge is communication. City 20 is a systemic game, and some of its systems are genuinely difficult to convey in a trailer or a store description. The depth is real, but it’s the kind of thing that only truly clicks when you’re actually playing it. We haven’t fully cracked how to communicate that from the outside, and I’m not sure anyone has.
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How do you think studios should approach using contract work to augment their own efforts? Selectively and honestly, both with clients and with yourselves. The studios that handle it well treat contract work as a genuine creative commitment, not just a financial buffer. Where it tends to go wrong is when the revenue is used to cross-subsidise original development without protecting the time and energy that IP actually needs. You end up doing neither thing properly. Our approach has been to structure development modularly so that the two tracks can coexist without one constantly bleeding into the other, and to be realistic about capacity before committing to anything.
What are you working on right now? City 20 is our main internal focus. We have a public roadmap with a new update coming soon, and we’re continuing to develop toward 1.0 with community feedback shaping the process. On the client side, we have several porting and co-dev projects in active development that we can’t name yet, with titles targeting release both in 2026 and 2027.
What can we expect from you across the rest of 2026? More City 20 updates; the roadmap is public and we intend to stick to it. Client projects shipping that we’ll be able to talk about more openly once they’re announced. And we’re also preparing what I’d describe as a significant structural change that will expand our reach while maintaining our independence. More on that when we’re able to share it.
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