By Patrick Garratt

After being formed in 2016 by former Bungie CEO Harold Ryan, ProbablyMonsters spent nine years as an incubator, publicly announcing its first two development studios, Cauldron and Firewalk, in October 2019. Firewalk Studios was sold to Sony in 2023, went on to ship the doomed Concord and was thus closed in 2024. Cauldron Studios, led by former Bungie art director Dave Matthews, cancelled its first game in 2023. A third internal developer, Battle Barge, had its game cancelled amid layoffs in 2024. ProbablyMonsters probably wasn't working too well.

Fortunately, the storm was weathered. ProbablyMonsters announced two solid projects, single-player narrative actioner Nekome: Nazi Hunter and gothic action RPG Crimson Moon, in February this year, shipping the latter earlier this month. Neither game is attributed to anything other than ProbablyMonsters, and, Knowledge is told by CMO David Reid, who joined quietly at the end of last year and went full-time not long after, the company is now accepting external pitches. From incubator to publisher-developer: why now?

Double-A games, triple-A sensibilities

"If you go back to 2024, when these discussions were starting to happen internally, people could see the industry was changing remarkably," says Reid. "You had a lot of studios that had put tremendous effort into making great triple-A live-service things, and we saw a lot of them just fail.

"On the one hand, at the top end of triple-A, you had a number of live-service games that were dominating the charts and continue to do so. It's almost like the dot-com era, how eBay became the thing. It just became impossible to dislodge – you couldn't build a better eBay.

"On the other hand, you see what's going on in the indie space – lots of interesting creative stuff, very focused things that small teams are able to do, with innovative game mechanics. What the company started to see was there's just this hollowed-out middle of the industry. That's really where we're now articulating this idea of double-A games with triple-A sensibilities. Intentionally scoped. We're not trying to put every feature that everybody has ever seen into it. We're trying to do what's distinctive and will be different."

Reid – previously CMO at Behaviour and Eve Online creator Fenris Studios, as well as SVP of publishing at Trion – is careful to draw a line around his own involvement. "That predates my arrival at the company," he says of the original strategic shift. "The company announced it in 2025. Effectively I started in December, very quietly, in a part-time role. After a bit it was like, 'Yeah, this is what I want to do full-time.' I love creating new IP. That's what's fun in the industry. It's hard, but that's the joy.

"The announcement of the publishing arm, with myself, Jonathan Lander, and the promotion of Mark Subotnick to chief product officer, was that idea of, 'Look, this is what we do now.' We make IP, we develop it internally, and we're going to publish it internally. It doesn't mean we're not working with platform partners. It doesn't mean we aren't looking at third-party games we might be able to publish. But there is an integrated development and publishing model here."

The internal reporting left by the restructuring is, in Reid's telling, unusually tidy. Subotnick, previously of Sega, Microsoft and Intel, oversees product development. ProbablyMonsters' publishing arm is headed by Lander, whose history includes Fenris Studios and Bethesda.

"The product development side of the organisation all rolls up to Mark," says Reid. "The studio heads for Nekome, for Crimson Moon, for other games we have in the pipeline, all roll up to him, along with a bit of shared development resources. Everything publishing-wise rolls up to Jon. That includes me. I report to Jon as his CMO. We have sales and commercial there. We have executive product managers who oversee the totality of the P&L for any one title. Those roll up to Jon too."

And the door to outside developers, he confirms, is genuinely open: "It's not just an internal portfolio model. We are having those discussions. Nothing I can talk about at this time."

Proof of concept: Crimson Moon and Nazi revenge

Asked whether the tonal gulf between a co-op gothic RPG and a solo Nazi-hunting revenge story was a deliberate statement about what the new model would greenlight, Reid points to development A-grade rather than genre.

"What we're hearing from people when they see both games, the commonality is, 'There's a lot of blood.' But other games in the pipeline are radically different. There's no real commonality there.

"The commonality does come back to this idea of double-A games with triple-A sensibilities. That intentional scope: what is the essence of this game? With Crimson Moon, it's really about that high-octane action RPG, a very different colour palette than a lot of these things that smell like Roguelikes and Soulslikes, which tend to be very dark, grim. Ours is a much brighter palette. It looks different. There are unmistakable heavy-metal overtones through the game, the marketing, even the art. And co-op is something exciting and different in the genre.

"Nekome, again, is very different – an intensely personal narrative and very visceral combat set in that period of time. The game director, Jeronimo Barrera, comes from Rockstar in his career, and I like to think he's bringing those sensibilities, but not the giant open world you see in a GTA or a Red Dead. [There's] double-A scope and triple-A sensibility in terms of polish and moment-to-moment experience.

"These were things that were in the portfolio long before I showed up. Hopefully, over time, people will come to understand that when they see the ProbablyMonsters logo on a game, it's going to be a little different, it's going to be unique, and it's going to be fun."

Nekome, specifically, was attractive to Reid.

"When I started my dialogue with the company, it was actually Jonathan Lander who was like, 'Oh yeah, they've got a Nazi-hunting game.' And, of course, what does your mind go to? Wolfenstein. World War II, guns, and so on. Then I get a look at the game and it's like, 'Whoa, this is something completely different.'

"There's just something about it that I find, on a personal front, very cathartic. It's a story of righteous justice. It's not just, 'We're hunting Nazis for the sake of hunting Nazis.' There's a protagonist here who has a real stake, whose family was murdered by the Nazis, and as a result he's going out and getting his revenge, hunting all of these people down, one by one. It has a vibe of Inglourious Basterds. It has a vibe of some of these great revenge stories, which at a basic level many of us can project ourselves into: 'If something like that happened to me, if my family was murdered, would I become that person, whose entire life becomes consumed by this?' It's a fascinating question."

The bet: community over budget

Reid's own playbook comes from Fenris and Behaviour, both of which focus squarely on community interaction as a direct part of the product development process.

"That's something I'm bringing into my work at ProbablyMonsters, especially when you peel back what it means to operate at the double-A level.

"We're not going to have the luxury of the enormous budgets other studios may have, and we're not going to have the same amount of time to build demand the way triple-A budgets allow. A lot of what you have to do in this space is quickly hone in on the target audience that's going to be excited about this game. How do I reach them best, and most efficiently, and fastest? A lot of times that's game builds, working with them in Discord, in social settings, with various influencers, to get builds in front of people, get that amplified, and let people make their content and bring them into the development process."

Asked what needs to be true a year from now for the pivot to have been worth it, Reid is pragmatic. He says of the just-released Crimson Moon that "we need to see that be successful, not just in its initial release, but in keeping up with the community and growing it. There is a vision that Crimson Moon can become a franchise. We've announced Nekome is coming in early 2027. We want to see that be successful as well. There's the potential for that to become more than one game. I hesitate to say anything more, because it can go in a bunch of different directions.

"Once you start building that portfolio, the publisher brand becomes more powerful. Other third parties start saying, 'Hey, it looks like these guys are being successful in this double-A, triple-A-sensibility space – we should talk with them.' Gamers start to recognise it. Industry trade members start to recognise that ProbablyMonsters is doing things differently, and doing things successfully. A year or two from now, that's where the company should be. At the end of the day, if gamers aren't loving these games, we'll have failed in many respects. That's for sure."