This article was originally published on August 7, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Dutch developer Little Chicken Game Company has spent most of its 25-year history building other people's games: serious titles and work-for-hire across mobile, VR and AR. Moonlight Peaks is its first title built and funded as owned IP.

For chief executive Yannis Bolman, the shift away from client work goes back to around 2017.

"We said, OK, we're going to do the games that we actually want to make, rather than client projects," he tells Knowledge. A life-sim had been "simmering in the back" of the studio's mind, and when a racing game the studio was developing for a publisher fell through around 2021, the studio decided to move ahead with its own game. The project was born as a surfing-themed life-sim.

"The surfing mechanics weren't quite there yet and didn't really come together," Bolman says. The studio tried several themes before landing on vampires, based on audience research.

"We knew life-sims were mostly played by women, and vampire movies and stories in general resonate really well with that audience," he says. "There's actually a niche within life-sims that wasn't really covered, and people were really yearning for it."

What followed reversed the usual indie funding story. Little Chicken began posting development footage almost as soon as work started, mainly to gauge demand. One TikTok video went viral, wishlists grew, and, before the studio had secured funding, publishers started approaching the developer rather than the other way round.

"Most times you as a developer have to chase publishers endlessly to get your game funded," Bolman says.

Landing XSEED and Marvelous

Among the publishers who got in touch was Marvelous USA, working under its XSEED Games label. Little Chicken had been weighing a Kickstarter campaign at the time; XSEED suggested talking first.

"We were also thinking about maybe doing a Kickstarter or something, and they said, 'Let's have a chat before you do that, because it might also complicate things a bit more,'" Bolman says.

Little Chicken held parallel talks with other publishers; some balked at its budget. Marvelous's offer, and its portfolio, stood out. "The deal that we got with Marvelous actually was the best of the bunch. Also, looking at their track record and history, they also seemed like the best match."

The deal was signed with Marvelous USA, but the wider Marvelous Group, headquartered in Japan with a European arm, was involved early.

"Once you talk to one, you pretty much talk to all of them," Bolman says. Despite this, Marvelous's Japanese office chose not to publish the game domestically. Marvelous USA instead sourced a separate partner for Asia, Clouded Leopard.

Bolman describes the relationship as unusually hands-off.

"The vertical slice we had back then gave them enough confidence to say, 'OK, just make this into a full game.'"

Input was limited to guidance on sensitive subject matter and support with story editing: "Little to complain about in how they approached the whole thing and let us do our thing."

The relationship has worked: Little Chicken announced on July 27 that Moonlight Peaks had sold more than 200,000 units since releasing just 20 days earlier.

Holding the game in your hand

International publishing and marketing wasn't the only positive the Marvelous deal brought to Moonlight Peaks: it also allowed for a Digital Deluxe edition with an artbook and soundtrack (but no disc).

Physical media as a topic has been hard to avoid this year. Sony's announcement that it will stop producing PlayStation discs for new games from January 2028 landed days after the backlash over GTAVI's own physical edition turned out to be a download code in a box.

A US physical release remains possible depending on how the digital version performs, but will not arrive at launch. Physical retail "always helps with putting eyeballs on the game," Bolman says, but producing and shipping a disc means locking the build two to three months early, time Little Chicken was reluctant to relinquish. Marvelous Europe wanted a physical edition regardless, and Asia, he says, is "still a bit more used to having physical editions."

Despite the greatly reduced profit margins in physical editions, Bolman remained undeterred.

"As a gamer, and also as a developer, it's really cool to actually be able to hold your game in your hand and have a box," he says. Staff keep asking when their copies will arrive. He ties that directly to the strength of the reaction to Sony's announcement: "You can't really touch [digital], and you can't sell the game, or give it to your friends to try out. I hope physical still stays around."

Life after the afterlife

Twenty people now work at Little Chicken, kept within what Bolman calls the studio's "sweet spot" of 20 to 30, avoiding the management layers that come with scale.

Surviving 25 years and multiple industry cycles, he says, has come down to adaptability rather than a defining hit: "Little Chicken is a new company every three to four years." That has meant staying open to work-for-hire when a project is interesting, while building the capability to do owned games too. It's this part of the business that Bolman wants to grow.

But whether that happens depends on how Moonlight Peaks performs.

"If it resonates with players, there's enough room to grow that into more games, maybe even more types of games within that universe," he says, adding that commercial proof also buys creative freedom for future pitches: "Once you have a certain name, you can more easily get there."

His advice to developers weighing the same move is to test demand before the game is finished.

"It's good if you start on a project to have that proof in your back pocket, to know that it has a certain potential," he says, mirroring advice given by Prideful Sloth's Cheryl Vance in an interview with Knowledge last week.

"Game developers are hopelessly romantic and in love with their own ideas. The hardest thing is having what you think is a great idea and finding no one cares. But it's valuable to know that early." Putting a project in front of an audience early, he says, "sounds maybe a bit cliché, but I think it really works like that."

This article was originally published on August 7, 2026 - read the full issue