ProbablyMonsters, an independent video game company headed by former Bungie leader Harold Ryan, announced the fall releases of its first two titles.
The games are Storm Lancers, a rogue-like game coming to Nintendo Switch, and Ire: A Prologue, a psychological horror experience arriving on Steam and Epic Games Store. Storm Lancers does not have a launch date, while Ire: A Prologue is coming out on October 28.
These are games that took a couple of years or less to make with relatively small teams. And they’re not what anyone expected when ProbablyMonsters raised $250 million in funding and built its teams up to hundreds of people. But these games do represent a pivot from the original plan, said Ryan in an interview with GamesBeat.
At first, Ryan said that the company, fresh from its Bungie roots, was focused on triple-A game development when it debuted in 2016 and then went public with its plans in 2019. But then came Concord.
Concord was sci-fi original game meant to be a live services game that lasted for years. But after seven years of development, it flopped. Concord began as one of the games that ProbablyMonsters was working on via its Firewalk Studios division. But then, in April 2023, ProbablyMonsters sold Firewalk Studios to Sony for an undisclosed price.
Concord debuted August 2024, and then Sony shut the game down and then closed Firewalk Studios in October, 2024. That stirred one of the biggest panics in gaming around triple-A games — the high costs, the unpredictable reactions and failure to deliver what gamers wanted.
That led ProbablyMonsters to rethink its plans, with a focus on smaller original games that could be made in a much shorter time with smaller teams. But it’s not exclusively working on smaller games. There are still plans for mid-size and large games as well, Ryan said.
During the process of evolving, ProbablyMonsters shrank from 450 or so people to about 200 today. Now, the teams that are left realize there are different ways to get to the market aside from the long path of triple-A games.
“The main transition for us is really landing on that there’s no single right way,” Ryan said. “And I think as a business, being willing to come to the point of inspiration for me, for a video game, is that moment when you understand the setting or the tone or the player empowerment you want to deliver, and how you want to wrap that,” he said. “Rather than set it in stone, you go back and ask, ‘When’s the right time to ship this? Well, what about next holiday? What would it look like?'”
Then the team gets the scope of the game right, and it’s greenlit for that period of time.
“It’s an empowering conversation to have with our creative directors and our game directors about what you really think is the best path to market for that idea,” Ryan said.
Evolution
The original goal of ProbablyMonsters was to provide game developers a predictable place to work, where they could feel respected and trusted.
“I think along with the rest of the industry, we’ve had to evolve,” Ryan said. “We had to make some hard decisions along the way, canceled some games. We had to transition a couple of our teams. And we raised a lot of capital, which gave us some high expectations to deliver against.”
The company was originally structured as a collection of independent studios. ProbablyMonsters would act as the centralized publisher for those studios, which were working on triple-A games. But the consumer base began changing in 2020 with the pandemic. The teams grew and demand for games spiked. Game VCs poured money into the industry. Then it all fizzled when the pandemic ended, as people went outdoors again and stopped playing games so much. Now there were too many games coming.
“For all of us in the industry, the real challenge is finding a path to sustainability,” Ryan said. “I think one of those paths, that path for us, is to not pick one way to get games to consumers.”
Rather, the company realized there are multiple ways to get games to consumers, and multiple types of games to make.
“We’re structured where we’re still building long-term games,” he said.
But now there are long-term, mid-term and short-term games in development. On short-term games, the team asks if it can get the game out by the next holiday season.
A new chapter
Back in 2020, the biggest risk in game development was keeping a team together from concept to launch. And then with live-service games, the challenge was to keep the team together after the launch. The investment isn’t just to build the game. In this case, the company will find out soon enough if it’s worth investing more in a game because consumers will either decide to buy it or not.
But ProbablyMonsters has moved on. Its new game launches mark a new chapter as the company moves from vision to delivery, bringing its long-standing mission to life through a focused, diversified slate of original games.
“These games represent the first public expression of the approach we’ve been shaping behind the scenes,” said Ryan. “We’ve always believed there’s a better way to make games, one that supports original IP, empowers developers, and delivers memorable experiences to players. How we bring games to life has evolved. We’ve had to adapt, and these first two titles reflect a model that’s more focused, flexible, and sustainable. This is just the start, and we’re excited to finally share them with the world.”
ProbablyMonsters’ new development model centers on integrated teams supported by centralized infrastructure. This structure enables shared systems, cross-team learning, and scalable production, while supporting a slate strategy that spans short-, mid-, and long-term projects, each with its own creative scope, timeline, and ambition.
Short-term titles move quickly, allowing teams to explore ideas, build momentum, and learn fast. Mid-term projects start with a focused scope but are built to grow, through deeper narratives, evolving gameplay, or recurring content.
Long-term projects are more ambitious, designed to become breakout IP or the foundation for future studios. With multiple internal teams working in parallel, the company can launch new titles now while continuing to build for the years ahead.
Storm Lancers and Ire: A Prologue are the first games shaped by this approach. Both are intentionally scoped, under-10-hour experiences designed to be accessible, affordable, and creatively distinct. Storm Lancers is a fast-moving, highly replayable, and built for co-op fun, while Ire: A Prologue reflects the early step in creating a title with the potential to evolve into a larger franchise. Together, they demonstrate ProbablyMonsters’ belief that meaningful experiences can take many forms, and that empowered creative teams can deliver great games without relying on scale alone.
“I think the industry’s evolved, and we’ve [moved] to match that,” Ryan said. “And it’s a significant change for us, but I think the most important reason I’m excited to talk about is because the result of that shift that we made, starting in 2023,” led to these new games coming out now.
And he said the company has multiple other games in development that it’s excited about.
“We have learned some lessons in the past, and I think we expect to continue to need to learn. We’re going to do it by shipping and I really hope the audiences that pick up these two games and find the joy and delight we hope it brings them,” Ryan said.
One of the biggest advantages was raising the $250 million. Ryan said the company is in “a great spot to bring these games to market” while still thinking about investments in future games.
“Both of these games were, while inspired by a bunch of work we had done over the years, whether that’s tools or technology or concept art or even art styles, potentially, were in their gameplay and their execution, full original concepts that started as a one pager, moved into a PowerPoint, and then moved into a playable. They did a playable demo pitch, and we did a concept doc layout. They’re both original,” Ryan said.
Last year, the games were raw concept pitches, and then they slowly came to life as artwork and other details progressed.
Storm Lancers
Storm Lancers is a rogue-like game inspired by 1980s anime and cartoons that features combo-focused fights and couch co-op. Led by industry veterans Jim Veevaert (Microsoft, Zynga) and Seth Thompson (Blizzard), Storm Lancers combines fluid combat with unstoppable momentum.
Designed to keep the heart racing and reflexes sharpened, the game gives players a sense of adventure constantly on the move. Set in the world of Cryptica, players crash land on a living planet built around a powerful source of reality magic. As they traverse five ever-shifting biomes, each leap, slash, and dash propels them deeper into a vibrant world, only to be met by enemies that adapt to their every move.
While Storm Lancers can be played solo, it’s designed to shine in couch co-op. Two players can team up to explore the alien world together, developing complementary playstyles as they battle through merciless enemies and terrifying bosses. Along the way, players collect items that transform and define their approach to combat, making each run unique and replayable.
“Storm Lancers is what we would call a short-term project, and it’s a fast-moving, action-packed, bite-sized roguelike. It’s bright and vibrant. It’s like a 1980s cartoon,” he said. “It’s a game that will feature couch co-op the and so it’s a great game to play solo, but also as a replayable roguelike,” Ryan said.
Ire: A Prologue
Ire: A Prologue is a first-person, single-player psychological horror game where players must unravel a complex mystery while avoiding a sinister creature that stalks them at every turn. Introduced as a prequel experience, it’s aimed at players drawn to focused, story-rich games, with the ambition of establishing the foundation for a potentially recurring horror franchise.
Developed by veteran worldbuilders Matt Case (Bungie, HBO) and CJ Cowan (Bungie), the Ire universe is designed to deliver fresh, unsettling chronicles with rich lore and immersive environments. In Ire: A Prologue, players will navigate through the memories of a young teenager named Emily, trapped on a boat in the Bermuda Triangle with a monster relentlessly hunting them. As players loop through various memories of her experience, they begin to piece together what happened to Emily and the crew of the ship, with each loop revealing new secrets and new stories.
The second game is Ire: A Prologue, and the team thinks of it as a potential pilot for what could be a bigger game, if the audience says they like it. The company could keep developing it with the hope of turning it into a franchise, but for now it is a mid-term title.
It’s a first-person psychological horror game, and it’ll come first to the PC, on Steam and on the Epic Games Store. You play as a character in this game where you’re you’re trying to solve this mystery as you run through it all the time while being hunted by a sinister monster.
“Both of the games are intentionally scoped. We really are thinking about designing for approachability and affordability when we think about our games that are in that 18-month or so development category, and so they’re both plan to come out at a $20 price point,” he said.
Players who are skilled in the genres will finish their runs in under 10 hours. But there’s more to unlock with replayability.
Together, Storm Lancers and Ire: A Prologue reflect the breadth of ProbablyMonsters’ creative strategy. One is bright, vibrant, and built for replayable co-op fun with friends. The other is dark, moody, and best experienced solo with headphones in a quiet room. Both offer unique experiences that aim to connect with different types of players in distinct ways.
Storm Lancers will launch on Nintendo Switch this fall and Ire: A Prologue will be available on Steam and Epic Games Store on October 28, both at a suggested retail price of $20. These are the first in a series of original titles from ProbablyMonsters, with multiple longer-term projects planned to launch in 2026 and 2027.
Those long-term games are original IP games. One is a co-op Souls roguelike. And another is an extraction base builder. By 2027, there is an open-world RPG that could come out.
“Our midterm games are ones where we understand the game experience and we have some maybe more aggressive goals for the narrative, or a little bit of research and development we want to do to prove out a new kind of game system. And that’s more where our mid-terms will be in. We try to plan them in the 18-month to 24-month window,” Ryan said.
And then long-term games, it’s more like making traditional games at scale. But the team still works hard to identify the right partners, the right resources and a globally connected development team.
When the company started, ProbablyMonsters was focused on Bellevue and Seattle, in Washington. Now it has more than 200 people, but they’re all spread out around the world across both studios and central services.
Ryan said the company has partners across the industry, some small and some larger. The key to sustainable games is to pick the right team for each idea.
Looking back on Concord
Some of the pressure to pivot came has early as 2020. The company held on to its teams but then had to realistically deal with the changing industry around the middle of 2023. It was clear that not every game was going to be “signable” with triple-A publishers.
“There weren’t enough spots in the market for us to get the games signed and picked up for funding. And so we started really looking hard at how we could measure what was happening in the industry, and how we could adjust our development process,” Ryan said. “Today, we are built very differently.”
As for Concord, Ryan said, “The very unfortunate outcome that happened for Concord and that team was a representative symptom that was happening in the industry on a more broad sense, which is just the amount of investment in launching and sustaining video games.”
He said the industry was pulling back hard from that and and it certainly was another moment of clarity when you looked at how far triple-A publishers are willing to go for a game.
The first real piece of pivoting was realizing that the company had to step away from its one-size-fits-all approach to triple-A games. Rather, it was better to target an idea and identify the audience and find the path to sustainability.
“You can make a lot of bets, and you can do some things to” double down on them along the way. But until you put a game in a consumer’s hands, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out.
“We all learn to ship video games by doing it,” Ryan said. “And so we went from the strategy conversations about going away from one-size-fits-all, and then went through the ideas the teams had, and what it meant to ship the ideas by the next holiday season.”
Then the team would put a structure around the project and measure it along the way.
Still aiming for sustainability
It turns out that it might be better to enable game developers to get their ideas to market quickly and that could lead to empowerment of talent and a sustainable and secure work place.
Ryan acknowledges that there is a need to generate revenue. His firm has existed as a pre-revenue company for a long time.
“Yes, you need to be a company. You need to have revenue,” he said. “The thing I’m the most excited about with our short-term titles ” is two things. One, it gives a kind of certainty for the team to know it’s going to be shipping. And it’s great to generate revenue by the next holiday by shipping those games.
Ryan feels like the industry is becoming better at talking about what’s working and what’s not working.
“We’re all trying to be as supportive of each other as we can,” Ryan said. “As a CEO in the industry, I would hope all of us would be focused on is this sustainability.”
The company still has its ambition of giving game developers a predictable career.
“That has not been easy. We’ve been faced with a bunch of hard decisions on that goal. We still have that goal. And I think now, if the clearest thing I’d say, I think getting there is, is about acknowledging that we’re we’re in a state of continuous learning, that the digital audience evolves faster than than the old school physical one ever did,” he said.