This article was originally published on February 6, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

For Emeric Thoa, co-founder and creative director of independent French studio The Game Bakers, success is not just about shipping games. Speaking to Knowledge in Montpellier, France, after the January 29 release of PC and PS5 climbing title Cairn, he paints a picture of a company seeking sustainability and recognition, not just raw sales.

Cairn, the 15-year-old studio's third project, took five years to make, most of which was not spent producing content at scale, but searching for a viable design. Cairn is more than a launch moment for Thoa. It's the payoff of a careful production philosophy.

"I was impatient," he admits. "Five years is a very long development… For more than three years, we were in prototyping, research and development. We really tried to find the recipe.

"We were trying to invent something that did not exist. There was no reference."

That absence of similar games represents both Cairn's creative strength and its production risk.

"You can't say, 'A bit like this, a bit like that'," Thoa points out. "We had to invent not only the mechanics, but also the whole pipeline for level design. How do you build a mountain that works with this climbing system? It took us three years to reach the moment where we said, 'Yes, this is it'."

Designing by subtraction

From a business standpoint, the most striking aspect of Cairn is its restraint rather than its ambition. Thoa describes The Game Bakers' approach as "a philosophy of design by subtraction." With a team of around 20 people, self-financed and self-published, the studio deliberately removes features that might easily be included in a larger production.

During development, Cairn flirted with more conventional structures, such as combat, before rejecting them. Taking the game to publishers hardened Thoa's resolve to retain the project's original direction and eventually self-publish.

"For over a year I hesitated to have combat, that [the protagonist] has a sword, then she climbs. And then one day we said, 'This is the subject. This is what we're doing.'

"But when we pitched it to publishers, combat, skill trees and experience points were all real questions. Finally, we decided to do it our way. We went all in."

That decision echoes a conceptual thread running through the studio’s previous games: liberty.

"There is a link between Furi, Haven and Cairn," Thoa says. "It's the theme of freedom. In Furi, you fight to live free. In Haven, it is about being free to love who you want. Here, it's the search for absolute freedom, the obsession with that feeling."

Windsurfing alongside ocean liners

Thoa's confidence in making those calls is informed by early experience at Ubisoft, where he worked at the start of his career.

"I learned a lot there, naturally," he says. "But after 15 years running The Game Bakers in a completely different context, I do a lot of things differently."

He adds: "Ubisoft's an ocean liner. We're windsurfing."

Large organisations can take risks, he argues, but they do so through layers of approval and compromise: "Here, the people who make the games decide. That simplifies everything."

Nowhere is that difference more visible than in the studio's working structure. Although The Game Bakers is rooted in Montpellier, only three team members are based there. Thoa's co-founder, Audrey Leprince, works from Denmark, the lead programmer is in Montreal, and the rest of the team is distributed across France.

"We had no money at all when we started the studio," Thoa says. "We couldn't ask people to move with their families, to take that risk. So we told them: your partner has a job, your children are in school, you're happy where you are. Come with us, but stay where you are. That allowed us to build a talented team. Over 15 years, we've built around people who are happy with remote work."

The approach is pragmatic rather than ideological.

"It doesn't have to be like that. If people want to be together in groups and they're not, then they're going to be unhappy and they won't work well. Remote work only works if people want it. If you put people who want to be together into remote work, they're miserable.

He references the return-to-office order just issued by Ubisoft as part of ongoing restructuring.

"When people don't want to come back on site, it's complicated… There are pluses and minuses, but when you have the mindset of trust and communication, remote work can improve quality of life massively. It's really great."

France, Montpellier and starting with nothing

While remote work has allowed The Game Bakers to build a strong team over many years, national structures have also been instrumental in allowing the studio to flourish. France, Thoa argues, remains one of a small group of countries with a genuine independent game culture.

The Game Bakers started with no capital, and state support was critical in getting established: "There is an employment pool, training, and funding mechanisms [in France]. We benefitted from that."

The southern French city of Montpellier, in particular, plays a role beyond lifestyle appeal. Montpellier is now home to more game studios than any other city in France apart from Paris.

"There is a network here," Thoa says. "There are also associations like Push Start that help people get going."

Of course, recent success stories have sharpened that sense of local possibility. The global breakout of Sandfall's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has put an unprecedented spotlight on Montpellier's development ecosystem. Thoa is candid about the emotional impact.

"All the friends around me and the other studios are hyper-jealous," he laughs. "You say 'Bravo!', but you think: 'I wish it were me'." He smiles, speaking of Cairn's launch. "It's not the success of Expedition 33, but it is very good. We're happy.

Recognition: attaining the true summit

Commercially, Cairn has achieved international recognition and validated a five-year gamble. Creatively, Thoa admits he's still at a processing stage.

"Rationally, I am extremely happy. In reality, there's a part of me, an absurd part, that wishes it were more," he says, not in terms of sales but rather in creating "the magic thing".

What he truly wants is recognition for the studio, not just from players but from peers.

"Success for me would be prizes, recognition from the industry – if professionals said, 'They took a risk, they put heart into it, and they created something we'd never seen before.'"

Awards would matter less as trophies than as proof of meaning: "Then I'd say, 'This is what I wanted to do with my life'."

Thoa says the studio's next project isn't fixed, but while the developer's future remains open, Cairn clearly illustrates success as the result of a very different type of independent development than we're used to talking about nowadays, of highly "efficient" development periods and sparse funding.

The Game Bakers' approach indicates that long timelines don't have to mean bloated scope, that remote-first teams can sustain complex projects, and that repeatedly and deliberately refusing to adopt cookie-cutter features can produce games that perfectly fit a studio's identity, in this case "freedom". Based on The Game Bakers' history, the studio, headed by Thoa and Leprince, will only climb higher.

(French-English translation by Patrick Garratt.)

This article was originally published on February 6, 2026 - read the full issue