This article was originally published on June 26, 2026 - read the full issue

By Alex Spencer

The first studio Jonathan Chey set up was Irrational Games, co-founded with Ken Levine and Rob Fermier, where he worked on System Shock 2 and the original BioShock. When Chey came to set up his second, Blue Manchu, his reputation was enough to get the studio's games noticed.

It helped, of course, that the games were excellent. Card Hunter captured the joys of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering played around a kitchen table with friends, while Void Bastards took the immersive-sim FPS games on which Chey had made his name and applied an FTL-style Roguelike twist and gorgeous comic-book visuals courtesy of art director (and fellow Irrational vet) Ben Lee.

Blue Manchu's most recent game, 2024's Wild Bastards, was also excellent – and yet it went almost unnoticed.

"I haven't run the numbers precisely, but I would say Wild Bastards has done roughly half as well as Void Bastards," Chey tells us today. Looking ahead to the studio's next game, he adds: "If Godzone 6 did half as well again, we would be in trouble."

As for why that might have happened, Chey tells a tale that will be familiar to any game developer: "It's very, very hard to get noticed these days. It's not like it was even five or six years ago." Whereas once upon a time, the studio's pedigree would have guaranteed at least some eyeballs on its games, modern players "have a lot of things vying for their attention," Chey says. "They don't necessarily have any reason to pay attention to you just because you made something they liked in the past, or you worked on some famous game or whatever."

This difficult lesson is one Blue Manchu has taken "to heart," Chey says. "We really took the time to think about, like, who are we in this huge industry? What is it that we bring to the table? There are lots of people now who can make really good games. The tools are all there. It's no longer that hard to make a firstperson shooter – or even a pretty good firstperson shooter."

The studio needed to work out what its games offered that set them apart from all the pretty good firstperson shooters. In part, Ben Lee adds, that meant "embracing the fact that we've never made games that were actually aimed at the broad market. Because, A, we're not really that interested in that, but B, we're not really capable of it. We're a very small group of people."

It's not that Blue Manchu is actively seeking a niche audience, Lee clarifies. "It's just that we're accepting, from the outset, that this is not for everyone. There will be people who think it's too complicated or too hard or whatever – and that's absolutely fine, as long as the people who do like it really enjoy it. You've got a better shot at establishing a following and an online foothold by doing that than you do by trying to go completely broad and just slipping down the drain with everyone else."

The result is a weird game, in the best possible way. Like the Bastards games before it, Godzone 6 is an immersive-sim FPS in a Roguelike format, but one where you play as an alien – a werewolf-type creature, perhaps, or a humanoid bluebottle – who mutates between every level. Your werewolf's skin might turn to crystal, or they might shrink, or sprout suckers on their legs allowing them to walk up walls and across ceilings. Or all of the above. 

It's a killer hook, something Chey acknowledges that Wild Bastards lacked. "I'm very proud of it," he says of the game. "But I think it probably could have benefited from a bit more sunlight while it was being developed." And so the developer is opening the shutters much sooner. Godzone 6's Steam page appeared back in April, before the studio even had key art prepared; for our preview in Edge 425, we played an earlier, less-finessed build than the development team would usually be comfortable with sharing. This has all been done in hopes of not only building anticipation but also testing the concept. "If it's a resounding kind of lack of interest or negative feedback, maybe we just don't keep going," Chey says. "But, I mean, that would be pretty sad at this stage."

The studio is able to make these decisions, in part, because for the first time since its debut, Blue Manchu will be self-publishing the game. (Having originally launched as a free-to-play browser game, Card Hunter didn't need to go through traditional channels.) 

Void Bastards was put out by Humble Bundle's then-nascent, now-defunct publishing operation, and Wild Bastards by Maximum Entertainment. Blue Manchu's approach to date hasn't followed the usual methods, however. "We have always had an unusual relationship with publishers," Chey explains, "as we are privileged enough to be able to self-fund our projects." That means the studio has only signed its games with publishers "late in the dev cycle," and relied on these partners primarily to help promote them to potential customers. 

"Like a lot of developers," Chey says, "we like developing – but marketing, not so much." That makes the idea "that a separate team can just swoop in and sell your product" extremely appealing. After Wild Bastards' struggles, however, Chey and his team have accepted that this "is clearly just a fantasy now."

So the only solution, as Chey sees it? "We have to suck it up and start doing that work for ourselves. Which means making dev diaries, talking to the community, doing public tests, posting on social media, etc, etc. Because we are the only people who are really capable of identifying what is special about our game and why people should care about it. If we can't do that for ourselves, how is a publisher – to whom you are just another part of a big portfolio of products – going to do it?"

It's a conclusion Blue Manchu has reached after a lot of soul-searching, but is yet to actually put to the test. "This is our theory," Chey acknowledges. "We will see how it works out."

This article was originally published on June 26, 2026 - read the full issue