By Patrick Garratt

Since releasing on August 13, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, Expression Games' first full title since forming in 2022, has sold more than one million copies. And the developer has had a terrible time. 

"It's been a really difficult five weeks," Expression CEO Errol Ismail tells Knowledge. "Shipping games is incredibly difficult, and especially in this market. There's so much pressure for success, to keep your team together, to give the studio a future." 

By the numbers, the Team17-published game is a hit. Alongside Bulkhead's Wardogs, now confirmed as having sold more than three million units since it launched three weeks ago, the multiplayer shooter is proving the validity of a publisher portfolio play that deliberately steered away from battle royale and extraction. No one could deny that selling a million units of a full-price double-A game and crowning the global Steam charts for four days is an amazing accolade for Expression. Not everything, however, has gone as Ismail would have liked. 

"The game has sold incredibly well," he says. "We always knew that we'd have commercial success. The critical reception for me was more of an unknown." 

Early reviews were encouraging, but scores drifted as more outlets weighed in, some of which, he says, "maybe didn't spend enough time in the game to really understand that core gameplay loop." Despite being clearly piqued by average review scores, he stands by the product: "We're still proud of the game that we shipped," he says, "but recognise that it didn't meet the expectations of our core playerbase as well as that wider demographic." 

Successful and sore 

Why do reviews still sting when the game is a clear commercial hit? Expression's business model is the reason: "We're a work-for-hire studio. We offer services to publishers and developers," Ismail explains. "Our future opportunities are defined by a combination of critical and commercial reception. We've got commercial. We now have to show, through the work that we're doing on Vietnam, that we understand our demographic and how quickly we can respond to that feedback." 

Vietnam sits at the centre of a deliberate strategy. Team17 has recently restructured into three dedicated portfolios, and WWII team-based shooter Hell Let Loose, acquired from original developer Black Matter in 2022, was the signature title of its shooter lineup alongside Wardogs.

"It's a concerted effort to target this space and to try and do something different," Ismail says. The pitch is "cost-effective, well-scoped videogames" for audiences that triple-A studios are spending heavily to chase. "Hell Let Loose has always been a niche," he adds. "We know that market's quite small, but you can be very successful in that space." 

He's gracious about Wardogs, even though the two games compete. "We've definitely lost some players to Wardogs," he admits. "I think most games have, and rightly so, because they made a fantastic game. It's fun. That's what we need to find in Hell Let Loose as well." 

Regardless of portfolio competition, though, Team17's shooter strategy has obviously worked, both for the publisher and for UK development. Britain now has two dedicated shooter studios with million-selling double-A hits thanks to Team17 acting on the current perceived wisdom of keeping budgets and feature scope tight. 

The studio Sony made 

Expression's origin story is one of acquisition. After leaving his position as development director at EA Shanghai in 2018, where he worked on Battlefield and other franchises, Ismail took control of Fabrik Games in 2020. Fabrik, however, was far from healthy. 

"It had no money. It was two million pounds in debt when I took the studio over," he says. He built a team there through his own networks: veteran leads with young, high-potential colleagues. Then Fabrik was absorbed into Firesprite as part of Sony's acquisition of the Liverpool studio. Ismail left, to eventually found Expression, but the experience of rebuilding Fabrik clearly marked him. 

"Fabrik had something that was different from any other studio I've worked at," he says. "It was about learning, it was about sharing experiences, it was about succeeding together. And that's why Expression exists, because Sony took that away from us. It was the best thing that ever happened." 

Four years on, Expression employs more than 100 people, and roughly 30 per cent of them came over from Fabrik. "I don't have shareholders," Ismail says. "I don't have a board. If someone has an idea, we can pivot." 

His ten years at EA still shape almost everything else. "I've always described Expression as a sort of mini EA studio in how we build games," he says. The quality bar came with him: "Regardless of what your budget is, regardless of what your team size is, build the best product you possibly can. We're not EA, but my brain's still there."

What he left behind was the inertia that comes with scale. Having worked on cancelled projects – including Visceral's Star Wars game, Project Ragtag – he watched teams in production still "trying to figure out what the game was, or who the audience was." Expression won't start without those questions answered. "We know what we're building before we start development," he says. "Battlefield has a thousand, two thousand people working on it. Failing fast in a small studio is what triple-A publishers struggle to do, because the machine is so big." Vietnam's team, by contrast, peaked at around 70 developers. 

His career experience has left Ismail with a self-deprecating attitude despite his successes. "This industry humbles you so quickly," he says. "There's no value in ego. We know how fragile the game industry is. We could sell X million units of Vietnam but still face financial difficulties, or the market changes again and Hell Let Loose is no longer relevant." 

Survival mode 

Asked what success looks like a year from now, Ismail shrugs. "This is going to sound like a really miserable answer but honestly it's: 'Still here'." 

The arithmetic explains why. "The cost to run the studio is half a million pounds per month," he says. "It's a lot of pressure." He co-founded Expression just before the industry's contraction began. "Someone said to me back in 2023, 'You're fucking mad. Why did you start a studio?' And it's like, I didn't see it coming." 

While the studio's size allows it to retain personal values built around its staff, Ismail remains pragmatically blunt in relation to Vietnam's initial success: "The reality of any business is that you can only take care of your people if the business still exists." 

But exist it does, even if, as is his wont, Ismail attributes Expression's success to factors other than his own judgement. "We were very fortunate, very lucky back in 2024 to sign two projects at the same time," he says, meaning Vietnam and another, unnamed game. "We put ourselves in the position to sign those projects, but we were lucky, and other studios haven't been. So hopefully in the next 12 months we continue to have a little bit of luck."